Effortful versus automatic emotional processing in schizophrenia: Insights from a face-vignette task

Abstract

Adaptive emotional responding relies on dual automatic and effortful processing streams. Dual-stream models of schizophrenia (SCZ) posit a selective deficit in neural circuits that govern goal-directed, effortful processes versus reactive, automatic processes. This imbalance suggests that when patients are confronted with competing automatic and effortful emotional response cues, they will exhibit diminished effortful responding and intact, possibly elevated, automatic responding compared to controls. This prediction was evaluated using a modified version of the face-vignette task (FVT). Participants viewed emotional faces (automatic response cue) paired with vignettes (effortful response cue) that signalled a different emotion category and were instructed to discriminate the manifest emotion. Patients made less vignette and more face responses than controls. However, the relationship between group and FVT responding was moderated by IQ and reading comprehension ability. These results replicate and extend previous research and provide tentative support for abnormal conflict resolution between automatic and effortful emotional processing predicted by dual-stream models of SCZ.

Keywords:

• Schizophrenia
• Emotion
• Conflict
• Face processing
• Automatic
• Effortful

Notes

¹ Given that responses were made on a nominal (i.e., categorical) scale, inter-rater reliability was obtained by computing the arithmetic mean of all kappa (κ) values (Siegel & Castellan, 1988) for each possible rater pair (see Light, 1971).

² The Flesch-Kincaid readability statistic takes into account average sentence length and average number of syllables per word within a given passage to compute an approximate grade level.

³ The original experiment included 12 neutral trials (neutral facial expressions paired with vignettes conveying no emotion) that were interspersed with the emotional trials. Neutral trials were originally included to examine if the hypothesized impairment in effortful, goal-directed responding among SCZ patients would manifest as inappropriately heightened emotional responding—that is, choosing an emotional response option instead of choosing “no emotion”. During the peer review process, both the authors and anonymous reviewers ultimately agreed that this aim was ancillary to the primary objective of the study, and the resultant data were not instructive to the overall narrative. Nevertheless, to ensure that this experiment can be replicated accurately, we note here that neutral trials were presented concurrently with emotional trials.