Patients with schizophrenia show increased aversion to angry faces in an associative learning task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Social cognition

Background:

• Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder affecting cognition and social interaction.
• Understanding decision-making processes in schizophrenia is crucial for developing effective interventions.
• Socially relevant stimuli, such as facial expressions, play a key role in social cognition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between socially relevant stimuli and decision-making in patients with schizophrenia.
• To compare the associative learning and reward processing of facial expressions between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• A stochastically rewarded associative learning task was employed.
• Participants (schizophrenia patients and healthy controls) learned to associate rewards with either an angry or a happy face.
• Performance was evaluated based on accuracy and face preference.

Main Results:

• Both groups performed above chance, with no significant difference in overall accuracy.
• Both groups preferred the happy face over the angry face.
• Schizophrenia patients showed significantly greater aversion to the angry face compared to controls, especially when rewards favored it.

Conclusions:

• Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate heightened aversion to angry facial expressions in a reward-learning context.
• This finding highlights potential alterations in social cue processing and decision-making in schizophrenia.
• The study underscores the impact of social stimuli on reward-based learning in this population.