2016 Volume 44 Issue 1 Pages 1-10
Schizophrenia patients, in interpersonal interaction scene, have a variety of dysfunction. They show the difficulty in empathy and self-motional expression to others feeling. In this study, schizophrenia patients and healthy subjects (12 persons each) were compared using NIRS equipment for cerebral blood flow fluctuation in pleasant and unpleasant image challenges. First, we gave the subjects pictures of pleasant and unpleasant organisms and instructed them to remember and imagine the pictures. When they were imaging the pictures, the changes of Oxy-Hb had been measured. As a result, in the healthy subjects, the front-temporal areas were significantly activated for both pleasant and unpleasant conditions and these areas were also activated for imaging the basic shapes. In the comparison of the healthy subjects and schizophrenia patients, the change of Oxy-Hb in the frontal lobe of the healthy subjects was significantly higher than that of schizophrenia patients under the unpleasant conditions. It indicates the reduction in the suppressive function of the frontal lobe of schizophrenia patients. The results of this study suggest that NIRS would be capable of becoming a convenient and useful psychophysiological indicator to understand the emotion-related brain function of schizophrenia.
