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Prefrontal Cortex Activity During Facial Affect Processing in Schizophrenia: Association with Clinical Symptoms and Social Cognitive Functions

Amrah ABDULLAYEV, Bora BASKAK, Nilay SEDES BASKAK, Yağmur KIR, Emre KALE, Halise DEVRİMCİ ÖZGÜVEN, Zeynel BARAN, Işıl YENİHAYAT
2018 29(4): 229-237
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Objectives: In the present study, we aimed to investigate the prefrontal
cortex (PFC) activity during facial affect recognition in schizophrenia,
as well as the association of this activity with symptom severity and with
the higher order social cognitive functions, namely recognition of false
beliefs, faux-pas and hinting.
Method: Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to
measure frontal cortical activity during a neuroimaging task prepared
with a standard set of pictures of facial affect. The data of the Index
Group (IG) consisting of 27 subjects with DSM-IV based diagnoses
of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disorder and control group
(CG) (N=25) were compared. The control condition was to detect nonaffective
changes on a neutral face. Associations with frontal activity
during affect recognition and clinical symptoms, false belief recognition,
hinting and faux-pas were investigated.
Results: Prefrontal activity during both affective and non-affective
conditions was higher in the IG than the CG. The IG performed worse
than the CG in social cognitive tests. Social cognitive test performance
was not correlated with cortical activity. There were no correlations
between education status, age and PFC activity in both groups. In the
IG, right ventral prefrontal cortex (VPFC) and right medial prefrontal
cortex (mPFC) activities were associated with hallucination severity.
Conclusion: These results suggest the presence of hyperfrontality
during face processing in schizophrenia. Results also suggest that
schizophrenia patients require more frontal resources to achieve a
performance comparable to that of healthy controls in order to detect
both affective and non-affective changes on a face. There might be a
relationship between facial processing and hallucinations.