Influence of emotional processing on working memory in schizophrenia. Schizophr Bull

Research on emotional processing in schizophrenia sug-gests relatively intact subjective responses to affective stim-uli ‘‘in the moment.’ ’ However, neuroimaging evidence suggests diminished activation in brain regions associated with emotional processing in schizophrenia. We asked whether given a more vulnerable cognitive system in schizo-phrenia, individuals with this disorder would show increased or decreased modulation of working memory (WM) as a function of the emotional content of stimuli compared with healthy control subjects. In addition, we examined whether higher anhedonia levels were associated with a di-minished impact of emotion on behavioral and brain acti-vation responses. In the present study, 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 healthy individuals completed blocks of a 2-back WM task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session. Blocks contained faces display-ing either only neutral stimuli or neutral and emotional stimuli (happy or fearful faces), randomly intermixed and occurring both as targets and non-targets. Both groups showed higher accuracy but slower reaction time for neg-ative compared to neutral stimuli. Individuals with schizo-phrenia showed intact amygdala activity in response to emotionally evocative stimuli, but demonstrated altered dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampal activity while performing an emotionally loadedWM-task. Higher levels of social anhedonia were associated with diminished amygdala responses to emotional stimuli and increased DLPFC activity in individuals with schizo-phrenia. Emotional arousal may challenge dorsal-frontal control systems, which may have both beneficial and det-rimental influences. Our findings suggest that disturban-ces in emotional processing in schizophrenia relate to alterations in emotion-cognition interactions rather than to the perception and subjective experience of emotion per se