Poster Session 05 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
02:30 pm - 03:45 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 05: Neuropsychiatry | Addiction/Dependence | Stress/Coping | Emotional/Social Processes
Final Abstract #62
Neurocognitive Correlates of Self-Reported Emotional Experience in Schizophrenia
Gary Remington, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada
Vina Goghari, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Category: Schizophrenia/Psychosis
Keyword 1: emotional processes
Keyword 2: apathy
Keyword 3: memory: normal
Objective:
Anhedonia, the inability or difficulty to experience pleasure, has long been considered a core negative symptom of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). In support of this assertion, people with SSD consistently report elevated trait anhedonia on questionnaires that ask them to rate their typical responses to common pleasurable experiences. However, people with SSD also report intact hedonic capacity in response to pleasurable stimuli in laboratory studies. Given that trait questionnaires often rely on experiential knowledge to inform the rating process, and given the well-documented learning and memory impairments in SSD, it is possible that cognitive deficit[s] in encoding, storing and/or retrieving positive emotional content is contributing to the state-trait discrepancies in this population. Since approach motivation is partially dependent on memory to predict favorable future outcomes, deficient emotional memory may further help to explain downstream volitional deficits common in people with SSD. The current study is seeking to better understand associations between neurocognition, state emotional experience and trait anhedonia in people with SSD and healthy controls. In particular, we are testing emotional verbal learning and memory processes as potential contributing mechanisms to the state-trait anhedonia discrepancies reported throughout the literature.
Participants and Methods:
In this case-control study, 50 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 50 demographically matched healthy controls between the ages of 20 and 60 years are currently being recruited at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. All participants completed measures of trait anhedonia (Chapman Physical and Social Anhedonia Scales), state emotional experience (48 pictures from the International Affective Picture System; IAPS), and neurocognitive functioning (attention, working memory, visual memory, emotional verbal learning and memory). Participants also completed measures of positive and negative symptom severity, depression and anxiety.
Results:
Consistent with previous literature, we hypothesize that participants with schizophrenia will demonstrate elevated trait anhedonia and neurocognitive impairments relative to healthy controls, as well as comparable levels of state positive and negative emotional ratings of IAPS pictures. We further predict that encoding and retrieval of positive emotional words on the emotional verbal learning task will negatively predict trait anhedonia scores in people with schizophrenia. Exploratory regression analyses will also be run to estimate the contributions of visual memory and auditory working memory to trait anhedonia scores in both groups.
Conclusions:
The current study has important implications for understanding the possible relationships between neurocognition and negative symptoms in people with SSD. If it is true that reduced memory for positive emotional experiences is contributing to trait anhedonia and avolition in SSD, the results of this study could inform future compensatory interventions aimed at improving encoding and/or retrieval of positive emotional experiences, which may have positive downstream implications for motivated behavior.
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