tion in the verbal long-term memory task. It is possible that if we had induced a shallower processing of the stimuli, emotional effect would have been stronger and more subtle differences in emotional memory modula- tion between HC and ROS would have come to light.
Social cognition
Finally, chapter 7 describes a study in ROS that investigates a
specific part of cognition that is closely related to emotion: social cog- nition. The term social cognition generally refers to the mental operati- ons that underlie social interactions, including perceiving, interpreting, and generating responses to the intentions, dispositions, and behaviors of others; weighing social situational factors in making inferences about other people’s beliefs, emotions and intentions (Green & Leitman, 2008). Social cognition in general is more correlated with social functioning than (neuro)cognition in SC (Fett et al., 2011).
We used an adapted version of the Simon task developed by Zorzi, Mapelli, Rusconi, and Umilta (2003) to investigate the effect of social cues on automatic spatial coding in ROS compared to HC. In a typical Simon task participants are required to react to the color of a stimulus. Although the position of the stimulus is irrelevant for performing the task, responses are faster and more accurate when the position of the stimu- lus corresponds to the position of the response key. Response selection is affected by irrelevant spatial information. In the task developed by Zorzi et al. (2003), instead of spatial information, gaze direction is used to affect response selection. Participants are shown a schematic drawing of human eyes with gaze directed to or away (social cues) from where participants had to react to the color of the (Zorzi et al., 2003). We inves- tigated whether the modulation of reaction times produced by stimulus (in)congruities differs between ROS and HC and whether this effect is the same for social cues (drawing of schematic eyes) as non-social cues (rectangle). As expected based on the previous chapters, ROS had longer overall reaction times than the HC. We found no difference in Simon effect between groups in the rectangle (non-social) condition. However in our study ROS had a significantly smaller Simon effect (less facilitation and less distraction) compared to HC in the social cue condition. This means that automatic spatial coding is modulated less by a social cue in ROS. This effect is not due to a general perceptual deficit, as effects for ROS and HC did not differ in the rectangle condition. Despite the fact that some studies found that SC profited more from gaze cues than HC (Langdon, Corner, McLaren, Coltheart, & Ward, 2006), our results are more in line with a previous study by Akiyama et al. (Akiyama et al., 2008) in chronic schizophrenia. These findings support our hypothesis that in ROS the in- teraction between cognition (spatial coding) and social cues is weakened. The only previous study examining the Simon effect in patients with schi- zophrenia (Gastaldo, Umilta, Bianchin, & Prior, 2002) reported a reduced Simon effect in SC in one hemifield. However, this study differs to ours in
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so many aspects that both studies are difficult to compare.
In line with the studies in chapter 3, 4 and 6, there were no correlations between the Simon effect and psychopathology. According to Bliksted et al. “social cognitive deficits in first-episode schizophrenia come in two distinct versions where one is a complex, cognitive deman- ding form linked with IQ. The other version is related to simpler forms of social cognition and independent of IQ” (Bliksted, Fagerlund, Weed, Frith, & Videbech, 2014). Our gaze cueing deficits seem to be more related to the latter category.
In the social cognition task described in chapter 7 we used non- emotional social cues (the eyes were not embedded in faces with angry or happy expression) and we found a less modulation of attention in ROS. In
chapters 4 and 6 we used emotional stimuli (words and pictures), which
held no social information and we found no difference in modulation of at- tention or memory in ROS. The emotional CPT task described in chapter
3 was designed to investigate the influence of emotion on sustained at-
tention and we used faces because they are a strong inducer of emotions and we found no difference in the way emotion modulated attention in ROS. Emotional face processing however is also considered part of social cognition (Green et al., 2008). So even if there already are deficits in so- cial cognition in ROS, not all domains of social cognition are disturbed in this phase of the illness.
In chapter 5 we argued that different and sometimes contradic-
tory results in the literature on emotional memory modulation in SC were due to methodological differences. Of course, this is also true when com- paring or integrating the results from the different chapters in this thesis. There are methodological differences because we wanted to examine the question “are there differences in emotion cognition interaction between ROS and HC?” from different perspectives. We investigated the way diffe- rent aspects of emotion (positive, negative or social; elicited by pictures, faces or words) influenced performance on different cognitive domains. On the other hand, the studies described in chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7 all included fairly large and homogeneous groups of participants compared to other studies investigating emotion-cognition interaction in schizophre- nia; all participants were male and were between 17 and 35 years of age. Furthermore, all patients received a diagnosis of recent onset schizophre- nia and used no or only one antipsychotic. We therefore hypothesize that, in the first clinical phase of schizophrenia in male patients, the way emo- tion in general influences various domains of (neuro)cognition is intact. Cognitive resources appear to linger at the emotional stimuli, speeding up their processing en keeping them stronger in (short-term) memory while making the processing of the subsequent neutral stimulus less efficient. The question remains however whether there are emotion cognition in- teraction deficits in more chronic schizophrenia. And if there are emotion cognition interaction deficits, why do they arise later in the course of the disease? When answering these questions, it will be important for future researchers to take into account that emotional modulation of cognition