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%0 Thesis
%A Koch, Kathrin
%T Die Interaktion emotionaler und kognitiver Verarbeitungsprozesse und deren zerebrale Korrelate bei Patienten mit Schizophrenie
%C Aachen
%I Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University
%M RWTH-CONV-123802
%P XI, 154 S. : Ill., graph. Darst.
%D 2006
%Z Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2006
%X In schizophrenia, impairments in both emotion and cognition are prominent and characterize its psychopathology. In particular, emotion recognition and experience as well as attention and working memory are dysfunctional and known to be accompanied by deficiencies in their corresponding cerebral correlates. However, interactions between emotion and cognition have not been investigated in greater detail in patients. Furthermore, there is no general agreement if certain impairments are a trait-like characteristic of the disorder or whether they are modifiable by practice and training. Against the background of these considerations in the present thesis two fMRI studies were performed. In the first one, 20 schizophrenia patients and 10 healthy volunteers have taken part. 10 of the patients participated in a standardized emotion discrimination training lasting 6 weeks, the other 10 patients pertained to a waiting control group. Patients with training were scanned before and after the training period; the remaining participants were also scanned twice with an interscan interval of 6 weeks. The aim of the training, which comprised mainly computer-based tasks, was to improve the patients’ ability to judge emotions in terms of valence, intensity and situational specificity. During scanning, participants had to perform an emotion discrimination task. As expected, the training had modifying effects on behavioural performance and cerebral activation. Thus, after the training patients exhibited improved emotion discrimination performance and increased BOLD signal in several task relevant regions (e.g. somatosensory cortex, precuneus). The findings suggest that the frequently reported impairments in schizophrenic patients in the context of discrimination and interpretation of facial emotions are not a trait-like characteristic of the disorder but are modifiable by adequate training procedures. The second study aimed to explore the effect of negative emotion on cognitive performance in schizophrenic patients. For this purpose, negative emotion was induced by means of negative olfactory stimulation in 17 patients and 17 healthy controls during the performance of an n-back task. Although negative emotion was associated with an impaired working memory performance in both groups, for the interaction controls showed activation increases in mainly parietal and prefrontal regions which were not detectable in the patient group. This finding is discussed in light of the psychopathology of schizophrenia. In addition, working memory performance was associated with relative activation decreases in a task-relevant fronto-parieto-cerebellar network in patients. Hence, the results are in line with findings of earlier studies on cerebral abnormalities in schizophrenia in the context of working memory. However, further studies are necessary to generalize the findings especially with regard to the mechanisms underlying cognitive-emotional interaction processes.
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)11
%9 Dissertation / PhD Thesis
%U https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/62220