ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Schizophrenia
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1593548
This article is part of the Research TopicCognitive impairments in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression: Dissecting common and divergent featuresView all 8 articles
Modulating effect of emotional arousal intensity on selective attention in schizophrenia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China
- 2Suzhou Social Welfare General Hospital, Suzhou, China, Suzhou, China
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The interaction between attention and emotion is one of the key questions in schizophrenia, but the mechanisms of how emotional information affects selective attention in schizophrenia are still unclear. The present study employed a cue-back-to-fixation procedure to manipulate the valence and emotional arousal intensity of stimuli presented at either cued locations (Experiment 1) or target locations (Experiment 2). The present study examined the impact of emotional arousal intensity on the inhibition of return (IOR)-a phenomenon characterized by faster responses to previously unattended relative to attended locations-in individuals with schizophrenia, during two distinct attentional phases: attentional disengagement and attentional reorientation. The results showed significant IOR effects for both schizophrenia (Experiment 1a and 2a) and control groups (Experiment 1b and 2b) regardless of the emotional stimuli with different arousal intensities presented at both the cued and target locations. However, as compared with negative low arousal stimuli or neutral low arousal stimuli, significantly larger IOR effect size for control groups was found when negative high arousal stimuli were presented in cued location and for schizophrenia groups was found when negative high arousal stimuli were presented in target location. These results may underly the mechanism of attentional deficit for schizophrenia towards different arousal intensities of emotional stimuli. During the attentional disengagement phase, schizophrenia patients are more likely to filtered out those high-arousal stimuli that endanger life while control group participants experience enhanced perceptual processing towards them; during the attentional reorientation phase, schizophrenia patients display "hyperfocusing" on those life-threatening higharousal stimuli while the control group manifest an "attentional blindness" phenomenon to avoid these threatening stimuli. Meanwhile, we also interpreted our findings in light of an alternative theory of salience dysregulation.
Keywords: Schizophrenia, inhibition of return, emotional arousal intensity, emotion, Attention
Received: 14 Mar 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yu, Dong, Qian, Liu and Wu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaogang Wu, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China
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