ABSTRACT
Disturbances in processing emotional information is a pervasive symptom in schizophrenia. Facial expressions are one of the most important nonverbal means to communicate mainly emotional states between people. The emotion discrimination task was designed as an event-related paradigm where each of the three event types were represented by forty items. Along with a face, two of the three German words “happy”, “sad” and “neutral” were shown on the left and right of the face. The behavioral tasks were a standard mood induction procedure and an emotion discrimination task during which Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) changes were assessed. In the mood induction procedure, participants had to take part in three similar sessions. BOLD changes were measured every 4 seconds in the whole brain using echo-planar imaging.
