Browsing by Author "Spilka, Michael"

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    A functional neuroimaging family study of facial emotion perception in schizophrenia
    (2014-09-12) Spilka, Michael; Goghari, Vina
    Deficits in facial emotion perception in schizophrenia may be a vulnerability marker for the disorder. Previous neuroimaging studies investigating these deficits were limited by confounding task demands that may recruit other impaired cognitive processes in schizophrenia. We used a family study design along with a passive viewing task to investigate brain activation abnormalities underlying facial emotion perception in schizophrenia and examine whether such abnormalities are associated with the genetic vulnerability for the disorder. Schizophrenia patients, nonpsychotic relatives, and healthy controls passively viewed images of facial emotions during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Region-of-interest and whole-brain analyses revealed hypoactivation in face processing areas for both schizophrenia patients and unaffected relatives compared to controls, and hyperactivation in relatives for frontal regions involved in emotion processing. Our results suggest that activation abnormalities during facial emotion perception represent genetic vulnerability markers for schizophrenia, and may be accompanied by compensatory mechanisms in relatives.
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    In the Eye Movements of the Beholder: Manipulating Visual Scanpaths During Facial Emotion Perception Modulates Functional Brain Activation in Schizophrenia Patients and Controls
    (2018-10-20) Spilka, Michael; Bray, Signe L.; Goghari, Vina M.; Achim, Amélie M.; Kopala-Sibley, Daniel C.; MacMaster, Frank P.; Sears, Christopher R.
    Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit deficits in the ability to perceive and recognize emotions from faces, and these deficits are significant predictors of functional outcome. Research into the origins of facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia has identified abnormalities in visual gaze behaviour and functional brain activation in patients during facial emotion perception; however, these two aspects of facial emotion processing have previously been studied in isolation. Nonetheless, several studies with healthy individuals and other clinical populations suggest a relationship between gaze behaviour and functional activation in regions also implicated in facial emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia (e.g., fusiform gyrus). These findings raise the important question of whether gaze behaviour abnormalities in schizophrenia contribute to reported functional activation abnormalities during facial emotion perception. In this dissertation, I examined whether manipulating visual scanpaths during facial emotion perception would modulate blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal change in a sample of schizophrenia patients and community controls. Patients and controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while viewing pictures of emotional faces. During the Typical Viewing condition, a fixation cue directed participants’ gaze primarily to the eyes and mouth, while gaze was directed to peripheral features during the Atypical Viewing condition. Participants additionally completed a practice version of the task outside the scanner and a traditional facial emotion discrimination task, while gaze behaviour was recorded with an eye tracker. Patients had reduced percentage of fixations to salient facial features during facial emotion discrimination, similar to previous findings. During the fMRI task, both viewing conditions elicited BOLD signal change throughout regions of the neural system for face perception. Typical Viewing led to greater activation in visual association cortex including the right “occipital face area”, while Atypical Viewing elicited greater activation in primary visual cortex and regions involved in attentional control, including the intraparietal sulcus and frontal eye fields. There were no group differences in functional activation, in contrast to previous findings. The results of this study indicate that gaze behaviour modulates activation in early face-processing regions, suggesting that abnormal gaze behaviour in schizophrenia may contribute to the documented activation abnormalities in these regions during facial emotion perception.