Schizophrenia is a debilitating disease associated with deficits in a wide variety of cognitive, social and emotional domains. This includes deficits in facial affect recognition, which have been suggested to be linked to problems in judging social intentions and as leading to social withdrawal. A number of behavioural studies report a greater deficit in the recognition of negative emotions (particularly fear). a parallel strand of research has examined the neural substrates of facial emotion recognition using neuroimaging techniques, and has reported reductions in levels of amygdala activation to fearful faces in schizophrenia patients. These finding, have, in combination, been interpreted as indicating a negative emotion specific deficit in schizophrenia underpinned by aberrant functioning of limbic structures including the amygdala. The current thesis attempts to deconstruct this formulation from two perspectives, a psychometric or task conceptualisation perspective, and a neuroimaging perspective.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:553623 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Johnston, Patrick James |
| Contributors | Schall, Ulrich : Scholey, Andrew |
| Publisher | Northumbria University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/7327/ |
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