AFFECTIVE DYSFUNCTION IN SCHIZOPHERNIA

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DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from applicant's abstract) The goal of the proposed research is to examine emotion processing in schizophrenia through convergence of neurobehavioral, structural and functional neuroimaging methods. Affective dysfunction has been recognized as a major deficit in schizophrenia. Advances in neuroscience provide unprecedented tools to probe the neurobiology of emotional processing in healthy people and determine with increased precision the mechanism responsible for dysfunction in people with schizophrenia. This has implications for understanding the presentation, course and treatment response of individuals with schizophrenia. The proposed line of investigation will assess emotion processing applying 3-D stimuli of facial expressions of emotions. This neurobehavioral domain will be related to neurocognitive processes and to clinical measures that assess symptoms and function, with special emphasis on affective state. Brain behavior relations will be established by concurrent neuroanatomic evaluations with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and with more specific neurobehavioral probes using functional MRI (fMRI). The anatomic studies permit volumetric measures of fronto-temporal structures implicated in the regulation of emotion. The neurobehavioral tasks developed to dissect emotion and cognitive processing will be applied as neurobehavioral probes during online measurements of brain activity with fMRI. This will afford an evaluation of brain systems that are recruited in healthy people during task performance, relative to people with schizophrenia who manifest deficit on such tasks. The application of a genetic strategy by studying family members of affected probands with the neurobehavioral paradigms will permit the integration of two powerful research strategies in schizophrenia, genetics and behavioral neuroscience, needed to assess genetic vulnerability. The longitudinal design will allow assessment of the stability of the neurobehavioral measures and their relation, at intake, to course of illness.