Neural signatures of emotional modulation and social cognition: Individual differences in healthy volunteers and psychiatric participants

BAEZ, S; AGUADO, J; HUEPE, D; LOPEZ, V; ORTEGA, R; LISCHINSKY, A; CETKOVICH, M; TORRALVA, T; MANES, F; IBAÑEZ, A

Florencia

Encuentro; Society for Psychophysiological Research 53rd. Annual Meeting; 2013

Society for Psychophysiological Research

In everyday social cognition contexts, facial and semantic emotional information seems to provide shortcuts for understanding, acting and predicting social outcomes. We tested the association between cortical markers of face emotional processing and socialcognitive measures. We also built a model, which can predict this association in healthy volunteers as well as in different groups of psychiatric patients. We investigated the early cortical processing of emotional stimuli (N170, using a face and word valence task) and their relationship with the social-cognitive profiles (theory of mind, fluid intelligence, speed processing, and executive functions). Group comparisons and individual differences were assessed among patients with schizophrenia (SCZ; n = 15) and their relatives (n = 14), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 14), euthymic bipolar disorder (BD; n = 13) and healthy participants (n = 41; matched by educational level, handedness,age and gender with the patients? groups). We developed a model of association between emotional N170 modulation and stimulus type modulation in relation to the participants? social-cognitive profile, using structural equation modeling (SEM). Our results provide evidence of emotional N170 impairments in the affected groups (SCZ and relatives, ADHD and BD) as well as subtle group differences. Importantly, cortical processing of emotional stimuli predicted the social cognition profile. This is the first study to report an association model of brain markers of emotional processing and social cognition profile.