Stroop & emotions Experiment

Stroop & emotions Experiment

Abstract

An examination of emotional processing in individuals with schizophrenia may aid in understanding the heterogeneous disease states of schizophrenia. An emotional Stroop test, comprising conditions separated by both emotional valence (positive, negative) and arousal (low, high), was administered to disorganized (N = 12) and non-disorganized (N = 15) schizophrenic and schizoaffective participants, and 22 non-patient controls. Results indicate that the performance of disorganized versus non-disorganized participants differed particularly on the negative, high arousal condition.1. Introduction

Emotion deals with things that are important and should, therefore, receive information processing priority. It is plausible that some emotional stimuli are picked up very quickly and set up the system in a particular emotional processing mode Evolution has enabled the brain to shift processing priorities on the basis of stimuli that are not even fully perceived. Particular classes of privileged stimuli, such as several types of vermin, facial expressions, but also blood and mutilations, have signalled emotional relevance throughout evolutionary history. These evolutionary prepared stimuli may have become engraved in our brains and activate emotional processing modes even at weak strengths or short durations. Evolutionary preparation is probably responsible for the paradoxical finding that affective priming by happy and angry faces gets stronger when presentation becomes weaker and conscious processing is presumably reduced.

Rather than comprising a single disease entity, schizophrenia may be a cluster of heterogeneous syndromes that differ in underlying structure (e.g., Andreasen et al., 1995). Efforts have been made toward the clarification of subtypes, encompassing more homogenous manifestations of the illness and perhaps common pathophysiology. At the descriptive level, the positive and negative symptom dimensions of schizophrenia can be broken down further into three syndromes. Negative symptoms, such as affective flattening, withdrawal, and avolition are included in a “psychomotor poverty” dimension. Positive symptoms can be divided into “reality distortion,” comprising hallucinations and delusions, and “disorganization,” describing attentional, conceptual, and behavioral disorganization.

1.1 Background of the study

Evidence for the last relationship, between the disorganization syndrome and abnormalities of arousal and emotional reactivity, is becoming increasingly evident. Docherty et al. (1994) categorize individuals as affectively reactive if they produce more speech errors, in the form of referential communication failure, when discussing affectively negative topics than when discussing affectively positive topics. This disruption in language production is speculated to reflect a differential responsivity to negative valence (Docherty et al., 1994). Specifically, language reactivity, during the discussion of stressful events, is greater in participants who scored higher on positive symptoms (includes both the positive and disorganization dimensions) (Docherty and Herbert, 1997), while unrelated to deficit symptoms (Cohen and Docherty, 2003). Similarly, Burbridge and Barch (2002) found that symptoms under the disorganization dimension predicted affective reactivity in language.

1.2. The emotional Stroop

In the current study, we examined whether aberrant emotional processing is evident in individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who score higher on levels of disorganization. Specifically, we compared the emotional Stroop performance of those within the schizophrenia spectrum group who scored higher in disorganization with those who scored ...