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

• Published in: Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences Vol. 70; no. 3; pp. 141 - 150
• Main Authors: Terrien, Sarah, Gobin, Pamela, Iakimova, Galina, Coutté, Alexandre, Thuaire, Flavien, Baltazart, Véronique, Mazzola‐Pomietto, Pascale, Besche‐Richard, Chrystel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Australia Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2016; Wiley
• Subjects: emotional context; Emotions - physiology; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; late positive component; Male; N400; Personality; Personality traits; Psychology; Reading; Schizotypal Personality Disorder - physiopathology; Schizotypal Personality Disorder - psychology; schizotypy; vulnerability; Young Adult; N400; late positive component; schizotypy; vulnerability; emotional context
• ISSN: 1323-1316; 1440-1819
• DOI: 10.1111/pcn.12366

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.