Introduction: Misattribution of motivational salience to non-salient (neutral) stimuli could be viewed as a hallmark of psychosis in schizophrenia. Studies have recently revealed increased subjective experience of emotional arousal (EA) to neutral social stimuli in paranoid schizophrenia psychosis, suggesting a misattribution of emotional salience to them. We examined this phenomenon directly by quantifying the level of EA subjectively attributed to low-arousal, neutral-valenced faces.
Subjects and methods: A task for EA attribution to neutral (in the context of affective) facial expressions was applied to 44 actively psychotic paranoid schizophrenia inpatients and 44 well-matched healthy controls.
Results: Psychotic patients, compared with healthy controls, rated the neutral faces as more aroused (t (86) = 3.15, p =.001) thus misattributing emotional salience to them.
Discussion: This finding supports the hypothesis that over-assignment of EA to neutral faces could be viewed as a subclinical affective mechanism of the clinically manifested experience of delusional perception.
Conclusion: The study provides the first direct empirical evidence for misattribution of emotional salience in terms of over-attribution of EA to neutral faces during acute paranoid schizophrenia psychosis.
Keywords: Schizophrenia; delusion; emotional salience; misattribution; neutral; perception; stimuli.