Electrophysiological correlates of emotional meaning in context in relation to facets of schizotypal personality traits: A dimensional study

Abstract

Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the neurocognitive processes mediating the processing of emotional information during the integration of contextual and social information in a schizotypal population.

Methods: One hundred and thirty-one healthy participants were evaluated using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and event-related potentials were recorded during a linguistic task in which participants read sentence pairs describing short social situations to themselves. The first sentence implicitly conveyed the positive or negative emotional state of a character. The second sentence was emotionally congruent or incongruent with the first sentence.

Results: Across our overall sample, our results revealed a greater N400 effect at right sites than left sites, whereas the late positive component effect was only observed at left sites. Concerning the correlation results, we observed a negative link between positive and global schizotypy and N400 modulation in response to congruent targets for positive context sentences. Results also showed a positive correlation between negative schizotypy and late positive component modulation in response to congruent targets for negative context sentences.

Conclusions: These results suggest that the different facets of the schizotypal personality traits influenced the integration of emotional context at the level of both early and later-mobilized neurocognitive processes.

Keywords: N400; emotional context; late positive component; schizotypy; vulnerability.

© 2015 The Authors. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences © 2015 Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology.