MISATTRIBUTION OF EMOTIONAL OVER-AROUSAL TO NEUTRAL FACES IN ACUTE PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIA PSYCHOSIS.

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.

Glutamate and modeling of schizophrenia symptoms: review of our findings: 1990-2014.

In the early 90s, we studied the role of perception disturbances in schizophrenia in our first clinical approaches, using the Bender test in schizophrenic patients. Results were clear, showing a shape discrimination failure. Following this initial results, we reproduced nuclear symptoms of schizophrenia in animal models, showing that perceptual disturbances, acquisition disturbances, decrease in affective levels and working memory disturbances can be induced by specific N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) glutamatergic blockade within the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS).