%0 Journal Article
%T Emotion Processing in Women with Schizophrenia Is Menstrual Cycle Phase and Affective Valence Dependent: An fMRI Study
%A Adrianna Mendrek
%A Josiane Bourque
%A Annie Dub¨¦
%A Nadia Lakis
%A Julie Champagne
%J ISRN Psychiatry
%D 2012
%R 10.5402/2012/656274
%X Despite a large number of functional neuroimaging investigations of emotion processing in schizophrenia, very few have included women. In the present study 21 schizophrenia and 23 healthy women underwent functional MRI (3T) on two occasions (during the follicular and luteal phase of their menstrual cycle) while viewing blocks of emotionally negative, positive and neutral images. During exposure to negatively charged images patients showed relatively less activations than controls during the luteal phase, but no between-group differences were observed during the follicular phase. In contrast, the exposure to positively valenced material produced no significant interaction, but the main effect of group; schizophrenia patients exhibited less activation than healthy controls during both phases of the menstrual cycle. This is the first study demonstrating that atypical neural activations associated with emotion processing in women diagnosed with schizophrenia depend on the menstrual cycle phase and on the affective valence of presented stimuli. 1. Introduction Schizophrenia is a complex and clinically heterogeneous psychiatric disorder with unknown etiology, age at onset in late adolescence/early adulthood, and a lifetime prevalence of approximately 1% [1, 2]. One of the hallmark characteristics of this devastating disorder is a disturbance in emotion processing, which has been demonstrated in numerous behavioral, physiological, and functional neuroimaging investigations that employed tasks ranging from passive viewing of emotional material, through to facial emotion identification and emotional memory [3¨C8]. Although widely investigated, the neural correlates of atypical emotion processing in schizophrenia patients are still not well understood. For instance, while the majority of studies report diminished activations in patients relative to healthy subjects in several regions implicated in affect (e.g., hippocampus, amygdala, medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal cortex, and cingulate cortices) (e.g., [9¨C12]), others have found no effect or increased neural reactivity to emotionally charged material (e.g., [13¨C15]). In our recent study we have observed diminished activations during retrieval of negatively valenced emotional material but enhanced activations during positively valenced condition in clinically stable schizophrenia patients relative to controls [8]. Thus, one important factor to consider is affective valence of presented stimuli. Another important variable is gender of tested individuals, as numerous studies in the general population have
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.psychiatry/2012/656274/