What Is Going On? The Process of Generating Questions about Emotion and Social Cognition in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia with Cartoon Situations and Faces.

Regarding the notion of putative “best” practices in social neuroscience and science in general, we contend that following established procedures has advantages, but prescriptive uniformity in methodology can obscure flaws, bias thinking, stifle creativity, and restrict exploration. Generating hypotheses is at least as important as testing hypotheses. To illustrate this process, we describe the following exploratory study.

Performance on a virtual reality spatial memory navigation task in depressed patients.

Objective: Findings on spatial memory in depression have been inconsistent. A navigation task based on virtual reality may provide a more sensitive and consistent measure of the hippocampal-related spatial memory deficits associated with depression.

Method: Performance on a novel virtual reality navigation task and a traditional measure of spatial memory was assessed in 30 depressed patients (unipolar and bipolar) and 19 normal comparison subjects.

Impaired emotion perception in schizophrenia: a differential deficit.

We investigated previously reported contradictory findings regarding the nature of deficits in emotion perception among patients with schizophrenia. Some studies have concluded that such deficits are due to a generalized impairment in visual processing of faces, while others have found it to be restricted to facial emotional expressions. We examined 37 patients and 32 healthy controls, matched on age and education, using three computerized tests: matching facial identity, matching facial emotional expressions, and discrimination of subtle differences in the valence of facial emotional expressions.