Brain Less Responsive to Social Rewards in Schizophrenia
Brain scans suggest people with schizophrenia are less sensitive to social rewards, compared with people without schizophrenia, according to a study published online in Schizophrenia Bulletin.
The study involved 27 patients with schizophrenia and 25 control subjects. Researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe blood flow in the brain and detect active areas while participants played a computerized version of a slot machine. The game had two categories of rewards: images of social rewards, such as smiling human faces, and images of nonsocial rewards, such as dollar bills.
“Human beings find social stimuli rewarding, which is thought to facilitate efficient social functioning,” researchers explained. “Although reward processing has been extensively studied in schizophrenia, a few studies have examined neural processes specifically involved in social reward processing.”
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Participants with schizophrenia had lower neural activity in the ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex, compared with control subjects, when viewing social rewards, researchers reported. When observing nonsocial rewards, neural activity in the brain regions was similar between the two groups.
“This study found reduced neural sensitivity in patients with schizophrenia in key reward-processing regions for social but not for nonsocial rewards,” researchers wrote. “These findings suggest a relatively specific social reward-processing deficit in schizophrenia during an implicit reinforcement learning task.”
—Jolynn Tumolo
References
Hopper L. Brains of people with schizophrenia are less reactive to social rewards like smiling faces, study shows [press release]. Los Angeles, California: UCLA; September 10, 2018.