Schizophrenia and altered Emotion Regulation

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted in patients with schizophrenia to asses the neural correlates of emotion processing and associative memory (Luck, Joober, Malla, and Lepage, 2016). These researchers hypothesized that in patients with schizophrenia an impairment would be found in emotion modulation as well as in associative memory. Behaviorally, it was found that first episode patients with schizophrenia were impaired in associative recognition memory. In addition, the patients were also impaired in associative memory and emotionally functions. The results showed that in healthy control subjects their performance was better in emotionally related conditions compared to neutral conditions. The reverse was found in patients (Luck et al., 2016). The fMRI results revealed that patients with schizophrenia had lower activity in medial temporal lobe areas. But they exhibited higher activity in the parahippocampal gyrus. It was concluded that in schizophrenia there might be a deficit in the cerebral parts related to encoding strategies (Luck et al., 2016).