[Specifics of emotional biases in decision making in juvenile endogenous attack-like schizophrenia]

To identify the ability of schizophrenic patients to make decisions based on the mechanism of emotional learning (Damasio's somatic markers hypothesis).

Forty patients with the juvenile endogenous attack-like schizophrenia were investigated. Based on the clinical data, the patients were separated into three groups with different levels of negative symptoms.

In all groups the deficit in the emotional decision making mechanism increased along with the progress of the disorder and was connected with the decrease in the ability to adequately estimate self-emotional state, to integrate the ambivalent feeling and to make decisions in ambiguous environment based on the past emotional experience. The executive function and the mechanism of the emotional decision making were found to be independent neurocognitive mechanisms.