Objectives: Negative emotion exerts a considerable influence on cognitive processes. This may have clinical implications in mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, where negative emotions often prevail. Experimentally this influence can be studied by using olfactory emotion induction.
Methods: Fourteen schizophrenia patients and 14 healthy volunteers were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging with respect to the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions. Emotion was induced by odorants during an n-back working memory task.
Results: Similar detrimental effects of negative stimulation on working memory performance were observed in patients and control subjects. Among the neural correlates modulating this interaction a decreased activation emerged in patients in the anterior cingulate and the medial superior frontal cortex and increased activation in the medial orbitofrontal and middle frontal area.
Conclusions: During emotion-cognition interaction hypoactivations were found in regions crucial for the monitoring/control of ongoing processes but also for emotion regulation. Decreased activations may reflect failure to adapt to higher task requirements. In contrast, increased activations could be indicative of a greater emotional response and irritation induced by the odour. These patterns may represent the neural correlates of an inefficient control of emotional influences on cognitive processes in patients with schizophrenia.