Schizophrenia And Sex Differences In Emotional Processing

Main Category: Schizophrenia
Article Date: 26 Mar 2007 - 8:00 PDT

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Patients with schizophrenia are known to be impaired in several domains of emotional processing. These deficits have been associated with impaired social functioning.

Since female patients show better social skills than male patients and healthy women outperform men in emotion recognition and empathic capacity, studying sex differences in emotional processing might contribute to a better understanding of the differences between men and women in the clinical manifestation of the illness.

To this end, sex differences were studied in facial emotion recognition, emotion recognition in prosody and semantics of spoken language; empathy and perception of social interaction; working memory in simultaneous and sequential processing of language and emotion; long-term memory for visual information with positive, negative and neutral content; sensitivity to threat (inhibition) and reward (activation) in relationship to heartmeasures.

The female advantage in emotion recognition, empathy and social perception was found to be preserved in schizophrenia. In addition, men but not women with schizophrenia were significantly impaired in performing a simultaneous language/emotion working memory task.

These findings may explain in part the better course and outcome of female patients with schizophrenia. However, in more complex sequential or long-term processing of (emotional) stimuli, no female advantage was observed.

Regarding inhibition, both male and female patients showed enhanced sensitivity to threat. Given the impaired performance in patients on all tasks involving emotional stimuli, our results confirm the accumulating evidence that schizophrenia is pre-eminently an emotional disorder.

PhD Thesis
Marion Scholten

Schizophrenia and sex differences in emotional processing

Supervisors
R.S. Kahn, A. Aleman and J. van Honk

Marion Scholten performed her PhD as member of staff of the department of Psychiatry. She did her PhD training at the department of Psychiatry and completed her thesis in the section of Developmental Disorders.

The Rudolf Magnus Institute is dedicated to Neuroscience

The institute was named after the first professor of Pharmacology in the Netherlands, Rudolf Magnus.

In 1968, on the initiative of David De Wied, the Department of Pharmacology was renamed "Rudolf Magnus Institute of Pharmacology", to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the first chair for Pharmacology in The Netherlands.

Under the directorship of De Wied's successor, Willem Hendrik Gispen, who was director in 1988-2000, the Rudolf Magnus Institute was transformed into a Neuroscience institute, aptly named Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, which encompassed many research groups from three Faculties of Utrecht University.

The present director Jan M. van Ree (director since 2001), has taken on himself the task to redefine the aims of the research within the institute. To this end, functional Sections were formed, each around a defined research topic, to maximise the use of resources and research output. The new elan of the Institute is among others expressed in the modernised logo.

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