Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate inconsistent preference judgments for affective and nonaffective stimuli.

Previous studies have typically found that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) report levels of emotional experience that are similar to controls (CN) when asked to view a single evocative stimulus and make an absolute judgment of stimulus "value." However, value is rarely assigned in absolute terms in real-life situations, where one alternative or experience is often evaluated alongside others, and value judgments are made in relative terms. In the current study, we examined performance on a preference task that requires individuals to differentiate between the relative values of different stimuli. In this task, subjects were presented with many pairs of moderately positive stimuli and asked to indicate which stimulus they preferred in each pair. Resulting data indicated the rank order of preference across stimuli and the consistency of their transitive mapping (ie, if A > B and B > C, then A should be > C). Individuals with SZ (n = 38) were both less consistent in their rankings of stimuli and more likely to have larger magnitudes of discrepant responses than control subjects (n = 27). Furthermore, CN showed clear differentiation between different valence categories of stimuli (ie, highly positive > mildly positive > mildly negative > highly negative); while individuals with SZ showed the same general pattern of results but with less differentiation between the valence levels. These data suggest that individuals with SZ are impaired in developing or maintaining nuanced representations of the different attributes of a stimulus, thus making stimuli of similar general value easily confusable.

[1]  J. Waltz,et al.  Reward processing in schizophrenia: a deficit in the representation of value. , 2008, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[2]  J. Wallis.  Orbitofrontal cortex and its contribution to decision-making. , 2007, Annual review of neuroscience.

[3]  L. J. Chapman,et al.  Scales for Physical and Social Anhedonia , 2012 .

[4]  Thomas Kolter,et al.  Implicit and explicit learning in schizophrenics treated with olanzapine and with classic neuroleptics , 2002, Psychopharmacology.

[5]  Emil Kraepelin,et al.  Dementia praecox and paraphrenia , 2002 .

[6]  Matthew L. Davidson,et al.  The neuroimaging of emotion. , 2008 .

[7]  N. Makris,et al.  Cortical abnormalities in schizophrenia identified by structural magnetic resonance imaging. , 1999, Archives of general psychiatry.

[8]  W. Schultz,et al.  Relative reward preference in primate orbitofrontal cortex , 1999, Nature.

[9]  A. Cohen,et al.  Emotional experience in patients with schizophrenia revisited: meta-analysis of laboratory studies. , 2010, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[10]  Sterling C. Johnson,et al.  The Cerebral Response during Subjective Choice with and without Self-reference , 2005, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[11]  G. Glover,et al.  Reflecting upon Feelings: An fMRI Study of Neural Systems Supporting the Attribution of Emotion to Self and Other , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[12]  W. Horan,et al.  Social Cognition in Schizophrenia , 2010 .

[13]  E. Moran,et al.  Emotional response deficits in schizophrenia: insights from affective science. , 2008, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[14]  Benjamin M. Robinson,et al.  Selective Reinforcement Learning Deficits in Schizophrenia Support Predictions from Computational Models of Striatal-Cortical Dysfunction , 2007, Biological Psychiatry.

[15]  J. Parkinson,et al.  Dissociable Contributions of the Human Amygdala and Orbitofrontal Cortex to Incentive Motivation and Goal Selection , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[16]  Martin P Paulus,et al.  Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation is critical for preference judgments , 2003, Neuroreport.

[17]  William A. Cunningham,et al.  Neural components of social evaluation. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[18]  R. Kahn,et al.  Deficits in Implicit Attention to Social Signals in Schizophrenia and High Risk Groups: Behavioural Evidence from a New Illusion , 2009, PloS one.

[19]  Samuel M. McClure,et al.  Anchors, scales and the relative coding of value in the brain , 2008, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[20]  Samuel M. McClure,et al.  Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks , 2004, Neuron.

[21]  Kevin N. Ochsner,et al.  The Social-Emotional Processing Stream: Five Core Constructs and Their Translational Potential for Schizophrenia and Beyond , 2008, Biological Psychiatry.

[22]  J. Jonides,et al.  Neuroimaging analyses of human working memory. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[23]  D. Yves von Cramon,et al.  C Decision-making and the fronta l lobes , 2006 .

[24]  P. Lang,et al.  International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Instruction Manual and Affective Ratings (Tech. Rep. No. A-4) , 1999 .

[25]  B. Turetsky,et al.  Whole-brain morphometric study of schizophrenia revealing a spatially complex set of focal abnormalities. , 2005, Archives of general psychiatry.

[26]  E. Bullmore,et al.  Procedural learning in schizophrenia: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation , 2002, Schizophrenia Research.

[27]  D. Barch,et al.  Anhedonia and the experience of emotion in individuals with schizophrenia. , 2007, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[28]  G. Juckel,et al.  Impairment of probabilistic reward-based learning in schizophrenia. , 2009, Neuropsychology.

[29]  S. Paradiso,et al.  Neural mechanisms of anhedonia in schizophrenia: a PET study of response to unpleasant and pleasant odors. , 2001, JAMA.

[30]  D. Braff,et al.  Neurocognitive deficits and functional outcome in schizophrenia: are we measuring the "right stuff"? , 2000, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[31]  M. Farah,et al.  Cerebral Cortex doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl176 The Role of Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Decision Making: Judgment under Uncertainty or Judgment Per Se? , 2007 .

[32]  T. Goldberg,et al.  Further evidence for dementia of the prefrontal type in schizophrenia? A controlled study of teaching the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. , 1987, Archives of general psychiatry.

[33]  J. Malley,et al.  Habit and skill learning in schizophrenia: evidence of normal striatal processing with abnormal cortical input. , 2002, Learning & memory.

[34]  D. Braff,et al.  Schizophrenia patients demonstrate a dissociation on declarative and non-declarative memory tests , 2000, Schizophrenia Research.

[35]  C. Carter,et al.  Anterior cingulate cortex activity and impaired self-monitoring of performance in patients with schizophrenia: an event-related fMRI study. , 2001, The American journal of psychiatry.

[36]  M. Deanna,et al.  The relationships among cognition, motivation, and emotion in schizophrenia: how much and how little we know. , 2005, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[37]  S. Galderisi,et al.  Conditional associative learning in drug-free schizophrenic patients. , 1987, Neuropsychobiology.

[38]  R. Murray,et al.  Episodic memory and learning in patients with chronic schizophrenia , 1999, Schizophrenia Research.

[39]  J. Gold,et al.  Decision-Making Impairments in the Context of Intact Reward Sensitivity in Schizophrenia , 2008, Biological Psychiatry.

[40]  M. Frank,et al.  Anatomy of a decision: striato-orbitofrontal interactions in reinforcement learning, decision making, and reversal. , 2006, Psychological review.

[41]  D. Howard,et al.  Implicit learning of visuospatial sequences in schizophrenia. , 2003, Neuropsychology.

[42]  Clay B. Holroyd,et al.  Learning-related changes in brain activity following errors and performance feedback in schizophrenia , 2008, Schizophrenia Research.

[43]  A. Antal,et al.  Schizophrenics know more than they can tell: probabilistic classification learning in schizophrenia , 2000, Psychological Medicine.

[44]  D. Barch.  The relationships among cognition, motivation, and emotion in schizophrenia: how much and how little we know. , 2005, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[45]  J. Gold,et al.  Effects of contextual processing on visual conditional associative learning in schizophrenia , 2000, Biological Psychiatry.

[46]  John Suckling,et al.  For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group. Effect of sunlight and season on serotonin turnover in the brain , 2002 .

[47]  K. Ochsner,et al.  The role of social cognition in emotion , 2008, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[48]  Javier Quintana,et al.  Prefrontal–posterior parietal networks in schizophrenia: primary dysfunctions and secondary compensations , 2003, Biological Psychiatry.

[49]  James A. Waltz,et al.  Probabilistic reversal learning impairments in schizophrenia: Further evidence of orbitofrontal dysfunction , 2007, Schizophrenia Research.

[50]  R. Elliott,et al.  Hedonic and informational functions of the human orbitofrontal cortex. , 2010, Cerebral cortex.

[51]  Evelyn C. Ferstl,et al.  The Anterior Frontomedian Cortex and Evaluative Judgment: An fMRI Study , 2002, NeuroImage.

[52]  J. Overall,et al.  The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale , 1962 .

[53]  A. Levy,et al.  Hypometabolism in olfactory cortical projection areas of male patients with schizophrenia: an initial positron emission tomography study , 1996, Psychiatry Research.

[54]  Benjamin M. Robinson,et al.  Delay discounting in schizophrenia , 2007, Cognitive neuropsychiatry.

[55]  T. Suslow,et al.  Reduced implicit and explicit sequence learning in first-episode schizophrenia , 2008, Neuropsychologia.

[56]  Michael F. Green,et al.  Approaching a consensus cognitive battery for clinical trials in schizophrenia: The NIMH-MATRICS conference to select cognitive domains and test criteria , 2004, Biological Psychiatry.