Alteration of semantic networks during swearing words processing in schizophrenia
Poster C87, Saturday, October 22, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Le Baron
Thong Ba Nguyen1, Yin Cui1, Woo Sung Kim1, Young-Chul Chung1; 1Department of Psychiatry, Chonbuk National University Medical School & Institute for Medical Sciences, Jeonju, South Korea
Background: Positive symptoms, such as delusion and hallucination, commonly include negative emotional content in schizophrenia. Although these symptoms of reality distortion in schizophrenia are linked to deficits in the mirror neuron system and the semantic network, which share the language system, there have been few studies for evaluating the changes in semantic networks during the processing of strong negative emotional words in patients with schizophrenia. Methods: In our study, 35 schizophrenia patients (21 remitted, 13 active, and 1 unknown) and 19 healthy controls were recruited, and the participants were asked to passively view the words that contained swearing and neutral content during fMRI. Results: Patients with schizophrenia, compared to healthy controls, showed under-activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, left middle frontal gyrus, and left angular/supramarginal gyrus, and remitted schizophrenia presented a higher activity in the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus than active schizophrenia. Furthermore, in the analysis of regions of interests, the left inferior and middle frontal gyrus activity was related to the severity of positive symptoms, including delusion and suspiciousness. Conclusions: Our results suggest that schizophrenia patients have trouble in semantic processing of possible symptom-related cues, and these abnormalities may be connected with the severity of positive symptoms related to reality distortion.
Topic Area: Translational Research