Altered language-salience network connectivity in schizophrenia and differential associations with emotion regulation

Emotion regulation is a key domain of social cognition, and its impairment contributes to poor psychosocial functioning in schizophrenia (SZ). The "Managing Emotions" (ME) branch of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) is widely used to assess this ability, yet its neural correlates remain unclear.

We examined resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) associated with MSCEIT-ME performance in 56 patients with schizophrenia and 56 healthy controls matched for age, sex, and years of education. Seed-based correlation analyses focused on three large-scale networks previously implicated in emotion regulation: the salience network (SN), the language network (LN), and the ventral attention network (VAN). Between-group differences and brain-behavior relationships were tested while controlling for IQ scores on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI). False discovery rate Benjamini-Yekutieli (FDR-BY) correction was applied to all analyses.

Patients with SZ scored significantly lower on the MSCEIT-ME compared to healthy subjects (HCs). Moreover, SZ patients exhibited reduced left-lateralized rsFC between SN and LN regions relative to HCs. These findings indicate altered language-salience connectivity in schizophrenia and show that, while connectivity is associated with emotion regulation ability in healthy individuals, no significant brain-behavior association was detected in patients. Therefore, the neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation deficits in schizophrenia remain to be clarified.

Schizophrenia was characterized by altered left-lateralized language-salience connectivity. However, because no significant brain-behavior associations were found in patients, the neural basis of emotion-regulation deficits in schizophrenia remains unresolved, highlighting the need for network-level investigations in larger samples.