Alfredo Sklar
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:57:59
Alfredo Sklar. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:05
In general, my work focuses on examining both the visual and auditory processing deficits in schizophrenia longitudinally.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:13
Today I'll be talking about the modulation of the N170 event-related potential by emotional facial expressions.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:21
In both chronic as well as early stage schizophrenia.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:28
So schizophrenia is characterized by very severe social functioning deficits. That are present early in the disease course.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:35
Impaired recognition of emotional facial expressions contribute to these deficits. And what's more, EEG studies have shown that the typical enhancement of the N170 component to face stimuli is impaired to schizophrenia.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:50
And there's some preliminary evidence that it's modulation by emotional stimuli is impaired in chronic illness as well.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:58:59
The current study included 26 individuals with schizophrenia during the first hospitalization and 28 during more chronic stages of their illness.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:06
And these were compared to age-matched controls. We recorded EEG during presentation of neutral as well as emotional facial expressions.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:16
And participants were asked to detect neutral faces as each one was presented.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:22
N170 amplitudes were recorded from P9 and 10 electrodes for the left and right hemispheres.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:28
And these amplitudes were correlated with symptom severity, which was assessed using the positive and negative syndrome scale.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:37
So turning to our results, among the younger cohort, the data of which is shown on the left side of the screen here.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:44
Both healthy controls and first hospitalized patients showed enhancement of their N170 component to all categories of emotional expressions versus neutral faces.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 15:59:56
As you can see here. In contrast, there was significant interaction between group and facial expression among the older cohort with individuals during chronic stages of their illness exhibiting a lack of any N170 amplitude modulation.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 16:00:14
This, however, remained intact among individuals and the age-matched healthy control cohort.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 16:00:24
Importantly, weaker modulation of the N170 across emotional expressions was associated with more severe negative symptoms in both the chronic as well as the first hospitalized patients.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 16:00:36
Taken together, these data suggest the progressive pathology of N170 generators in schizophrenia that's associated with some of the most persistent and apparent symptoms of the disorder.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 16:00:48
If you'd like to learn more about some of these data, please stop by our poster, which is number M24, and I'll be presenting it on poster day number two.
[Sklar, Alfredo] 16:00:58
And thank you for your attention.
