The function of selective attention to non-emotional and emotional information in patients with schizophrenia

Abstract

The function of selective attention for emotional and non-emotional information in schizophrenic patients is examined with the Stroop task and an emotional Stroop task. In the Stroop task, no significant differences in response times were observed between the incongruent and neutral conditions with schizophrenic patients, although the difference in error rates for the incongruent and neutral conditions was larger for schizophrenic patients than for the control group. These results suggest that for schizophrenic patients the suppression function for irrelevant information is lower and that it is difficult to maintain task demands. In the emotional Stroop task, response times and error rates did not differ across word conditions. This suggests that the cognitive functional difficulties of schizophrenic patients for emotional information is due to reduced processing for emotional information rather than an attentional bias for emotional information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)