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.

We recorded VEPs elicited with new developed low spatial frequency, high temporal frequency and low contrast visual stimuli (M stimuli) to evaluate magnocellular function in both 8 patients with glaucoma or 5 patients with ocular hypertension and 13 normal subjects. VEPs were recorded from Oz electrodes, and analyzed with complex demodulation methods. Peak amplitudes were plotted as a function of the log of the stimulus contrast. The VEP contrast thresholds were determined by a linear extrapolation to zero amplitude. VEP peak amplitudes with 10% and 15% contrast stimuli were lower and contrast thresholds were higher in glaucoma group and ocular hypertension group (p<0.05). Contrast thresholds of 6 out of 13 patients were higher than the normal range. M stimuli-elicited-VEPs may be useful to evaluate the early functional impairment in patients with glaucoma or ocular hypertension.