Influence of emotional contexts on facial emotion attribution in schizophrenia

Clouded judgments? The role of virtual weather in word valence evaluations

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions - sunny versus rainy - affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words' emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environmental simulations. Contrary to expectations, we found that while rainy conditions modestly prolonged response times, they did not significantly alter the emotional valence attributed to words. Our study shows that weather can affect emotional cognition, but intrinsic emotional word properties are resilient to environmental influences. This highlights the complex interplay between environmental factors and linguistic processing and reaffirms the importance of environmental contexts in cognitive and emotional evaluations, especially in the face of climate change. By integrating VR technology with environmental psychology and linguistics, our research offers novel insights into the subtle yet significant ways in which virtual and real-world environments converge to shape human emotional and cognitive responses.

Cognitive versus emotional modulation within a Stroop paradigm in patients with schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

Schizophrenia is a complex disorder involving deficits in both cognitive and emotional processes. Specifically, a marked deficit in cognitive control has been found, which seems to increase when dealing with emotional information.

AIMS

With the aim of exploring the possible common links behind cognitive and emotional deficits, two versions of the emotional Stroop task were administered.

METHOD

In the cognitive-emotional task, participants had to name the ink colour (while ignoring the meaning) of emotional words. In contrast, the emotional-emotional task consisted of emotional words superimposed on emotional faces, and the participants had to indicate the emotional valence of the faces. Fifty-eight participants (29 in-patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and 29 controls) took part in the study.

RESULTS

Patients and controls showed similar response times in the cognitive-emotional task; however, patients were significantly slower than controls in the emotional-emotional task. This result supports the idea that patients show a more pronounced impairment in conflict modulation with emotional content. Besides, no significant correlations between the tasks and positive or negative symptoms were found. This would indicate that deficits are relatively independent of the clinical status of patients. However, a significant correlation between the emotional-emotional task and cognitive symptoms was found.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest a restricted capacity of patients with schizophrenia to deal with the attentional demands arising from emotional stimuli.