Emotional Scene Processing Across the Schizobipolar Spectrum: A Multivariate Approach

Reward and motivation deficits may underlie symptoms of psychosis syndromes. Research suggests impaired emotional abilities in psychosis, including reduced cognitive control over emotions and deficient facial emotion processing and identification. Emotional scenes elicit a robust neural response and are a well-researched aspect of emotion. Previous studies investigating the emotional scene response in psychosis using electroencephalography (EEG) have focused on non-affective psychosis and yielded mixed findings. The current study employs EEG and self-report in a large, transdiagnostic sample to investigate emotional scene processing. Two temporal components of the neural response (early and late processing) were extracted using principal component analysis. The early component suggested impaired visual processing in groups with high psychosis and affective disturbance, while the late component and self-reported arousal indicated emotional impairments following a severity continuum with increasingly less-affective psychosis. Emotional measures correlated with cognition and social functioning, supporting a relationship between emotional scene processing and social cognition.