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OBJECTIVE: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is defined as a persistent pattern of inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning anofd development. Increased emotional reactivity and impaired emotion regulation are established findings in children with ADHD. Impairments in executive functions such as impulse control and working memory, in turn, have also been suggested to have a negative effect on emotion recognition. However, studies exploring suspected deficits in the ability to recognise facial emotions in ADHD have to date yielded controversial results. We sought to clarify the mechanism of possible emotion recognition dysfunction in children with ADHD. METHODS: Sixty-one children diagnosed with ADHD (aged 10.36 ± 1.89 years) and a control group (N = 78; aged 9.6 ± 1.8 years) were evaluated with questionnaires and computerized tests for cognitive and facial emotion recognition capacity. RESULTS: The ADHD group displayed more behavioural issues and performed worse in cognitive tests compared to the control group. Group status (i.e. ADHD vs. control group) did not predict facial emotion recognition when controlled for age, IQ and sex in linear regression models. Performance in Divided Attention predicted facial emotion recognition in linear regression in the ADHD group. CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with ADHD showed facial emotion recognition capacity similar to a typically developing control group. Good performance in a cognitive test assessing divided attention predicted capacity for facial emotion recognition, but only in the ADHD group.
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Writing stands as one of humanity's most profound inventions, facilitating the efficient sharing and transmission of vast amounts of information. Similar to images and facial expressions, visual (written) words possess the ability to evoke emotional connotations. Understanding how the brain perceives these emotional nuances encoded in highly symbolic visual words is a key focus of the emerging field of "affective neurolinguistics." At the core of this inquiry lies the examination of the early posterior negativity (EPN), an event-related potentials (ERPs) component peaking around 300 ms after stimulus onset in the occipitotemporal scalp region. EPN has consistently emerged in response to emotional stimuli, encompassing pictures, faces, and visual words. However, prior research has notably lacked observation of EPN in response to Chinese emotional words, raising questions about potential differences in emotional processing between Chinese and other languages. Given the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system and the prevalence of compound words in the Chinese lexicon, this study aims to explore whether the emotional processing of Chinese monomorphic and compound words elicits an EPN response. Two experiments were conducted: Experiment 1 utilized one-character words (monomorphic words), while Experiment 2 employed two-character words (compound words). Participants were assigned a go/no-go task, instructed to respond to unknown words (word recognition task) or blue stimuli (color decision task). Data analysis using a data-driven mass univariate approach revealed significant ERP differences between emotional and neutral words. Notably, the time course, scalp topography, and cortical generators of the difference ERP presented a characteristic EPN response in both experiments. These findings strongly support the notion that the processing of emotional connotations in both Chinese monomorphic and compound words is reflected by the EPN, paving the way for future research using EPN as an emotion-related ERP component for investigating emotional processing of Chinese words.
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OBJECTIVE: Clinically anxious youth are hypervigilant to emotional stimuli and display difficulty shifting attention from emotional to nonemotional stimuli, suggesting impairments in cognitive control over emotion. However, it is unknown whether the neural substrates of such biases vary across the clinical-to-nonclinical range of anxiety or by age. METHOD: Youth aged 7 to 17 years with clinical anxiety (n = 119) or without an anxiety diagnosis (n = 41) matched emotional faces or matched shapes flanked by emotional face distractors during magnetic resonance imaging, probing emotion processing and cognitive control over emotion, respectively. Building from the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, clinically anxious youth were sampled across diagnostic categories, and non-clinically affected youth were sampled across minimal-to-subclinical severity. RESULTS: Across both conditions, anxiety severity was associated with hyperactivation in the right inferior parietal lobe, a substrate of hypervigilance. Brain-anxiety associations were also differentiated by attentional state; anxiety severity was associated with greater left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation during emotion processing (face matching) and greater activation in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction (and slower responses) during cognitive control over emotion (shape matching). Age also moderated associations between anxiety and cognitive control over emotion, such that anxiety was associated with greater right thalamus and bilateral posterior cingulate cortex activation for children at younger and mean ages, but not for older youth. CONCLUSION: Aberrant function in brain regions implicated in stimulus-driven attention to emotional distractors may contribute to anxiety in youth. Results support the potential utility of attention modulation interventions for anxiety that are tailored to developmental stage. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION INFORMATION: Dimensional Brain Behavior Predictors of CBT Outcomes in Pediatric Anxiety; https://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT02810171.
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Facial emotion processing (FEP) tends to be right hemisphere lateralized. This right-hemispheric bias (RHB) for FEP varies within and between individuals. The aim of the present research was to examine evidence pertaining to the prominent theories of FEP hemispheric bias as measured by a half-emotional half-neutral (no emotion) chimeric faces task. FEP hemispheric bias was indexed using laterality quotients (LQs) calculated from a Chimeric Faces Task completed by 427 adults recruited from the general population aged 18-67 years. Participants indicated which of two identical (but mirrored) emotional-neutral chimeric faces were more emotive. While all investigated emotions (fear, anger, and happiness) were right lateralized, fear was significantly more right lateralized than anger and happiness. These results provide evidence for both the right hemisphere hypothesis and the motivational hypothesis of emotion perception.
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Impaired socioemotional functioning characterizes autistic children, but does weak inhibition control underlie their socioemotional difficulty? This study addressed this question by examining whether and, if so, how inhibition control is affected by face realism and emotional valence in school-age autistic and neurotypical children. Fifty-two autistic and 52 age-matched neurotypical controls aged 10-12 years completed real and cartoon emotional face Go/Nogo tasks while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The analyses of inhibition-emotion components (i.e., N2, P3, and LPP) and a face-specific N170 revealed that autistic children elicited greater N2 while inhibiting Nogo trials and greater P3/LPP and late LPP for real but not cartoon emotional faces. Moreover, autistic children exhibited a reduced N170 to real face emotions only. Furthermore, correlation results showed that better behavioral inhibition and emotion recognition in autistic children were associated with a reduced N170. These findings suggest that neural mechanisms of inhibitory control in autistic children are less efficient and more disrupted during real face processing, which may affect their age-appropriate socio-emotional development.
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Trastorno Autístico , Electroencefalografía , Emociones , Potenciales Evocados , Expresión Facial , Inhibición Psicológica , Humanos , Niño , Masculino , Femenino , Potenciales Evocados/fisiología , Emociones/fisiología , Trastorno Autístico/fisiopatología , Trastorno Autístico/psicología , Electroencefalografía/métodos , Reconocimiento Facial/fisiología , Dibujos Animados como AsuntoRESUMEN
In the processing of emotions, the brain prepares and reacts in distinctive manners depending upon the negative or positive nuance of the emotion elicitors. Previous investigations showed that negative elicitors generally evoke more intense neural activities than positive and neutral ones, as reflected in the augmented amplitude of all sub-components of the event-related potentials (ERP) late posterior positivity (LPP) complex, while less is known about the emotion of disgust. The present study aimed to examine whether the LPP complex during the processing of disgust stimuli showed greater amplitude than other emotion elicitors with negative or positive valences, thus confirming it as a neural marker of disgust-related negativity bias at earlier or later stages. Thus, in the present study, we leveraged the ERP technique during the execution of an affective self-administered visual stimuli task to disentangle the neural contributions associated with images of positive, negative, disgust, or neutral emotions. Crucially, we showed that handling with disgust elicitors prompted the greatest neural activity and the highest delay during self-administration. Overall, we demonstrated progressive neural activities associated with the unpleasantness of the emotion elicitors and peculiar processing for disgust compared with all other emotions.
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Introduction: As a source of audio-visual stimulation, movies expose people to various emotions. Interestingly, several genres are characterized by negative emotional content. Albeit theoretical approaches exist, little is known about preferences for specific movie genres and the neuronal processing of negative emotions. Methods: We investigated associations between movie genre preference and limbic and reward-related brain reactivity to close this gap by employing an fMRI paradigm with negative emotional faces in 257 healthy participants. We compared the functional activity of the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) between individuals with a preference for a particular movie genre and those without such preference. Results and discussion: Amygdala activation was relatively higher in individuals with action movie preference (p TFCE-FWE = 0.013). Comedy genre preference was associated with increased amygdala (p TFCE-FWE = 0.038) and NAcc activity (p TFCE-FWE = 0.011). In contrast, crime/thriller preference (amygdala: p TFCE-FWE ≤ 0.010, NAcc: p TFCE-FWE = 0.036), as well as documentary preference, was linked to the decreased amygdala (p TFCE-FWE = 0.012) and NAcc activity (p TFCE-FWE = 0.015). The study revealed associations between participants' genre preferences and brain reactivity to negative affective stimuli. Interestingly, preferences for genres with similar emotion profiles (action, crime/thriller) were associated with oppositely directed neural activity. Potential links between brain reactivity and susceptibility to different movie-related gratifications are discussed.
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The present meta-analysis summarizes brain activation for social cognition and emotion-processing tasks in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We carried out two meta-analyses to elaborate on commonalities and potential differences between the two types of tasks. In the first meta-analysis, we implemented a more liberal strategy for task selection (including social and emotional content). The results confirmed previously reported hyperactivations in patients with BPD in the bilateral amygdala and prefrontal cortex and hypoactivations in bilateral inferior frontal gyri. When applying a stricter approach to task selection, focusing narrowly on social cognition tasks, we only found activation in prefrontal areas, particularly in the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. We review the role of these areas in social cognition in healthy adults, suggesting that the observed BPD hyperactivations may reflect an overreliance on self-related thought in social cognition.
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OBJECTIVE: Abnormal visual processing has been proposed as a mechanism underlying excessive focus on minor appearance flaws in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Existing BDD research has not differentiated the various stages of face processing (featural, first-order configural, holistic and second-order configural) that are required for higher-order processes such as emotion recognition. This study investigated a hierarchical visual processing model to examine the nature of abnormalities in face processing in BDD. METHOD: Thirty BDD participants and 27 healthy controls completed the Navon task, a featural and configural face processing task and a facial emotion labelling task. RESULTS: BDD participants performed similarly to controls when processing global and local non-face stimuli on the Navon task, when detecting subtle changes in the features and spacing of a target face, and when labelling emotional faces. However, BDD participants displayed poorer performance when viewing inverted faces, indicating difficulties in configural processing. CONCLUSIONS: The findings only partially support prior work. However, synthesis of results with previous findings indicates that heterogenous task methodologies may contribute to inconsistent findings. Recommendations are provided regarding the task parameters that appear most sensitive to abnormalities in BDD.
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Trastorno Dismórfico Corporal , Emociones , Adulto , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Trastorno Dismórfico Corporal/psicología , Expresión Facial , Reconocimiento Facial/fisiología , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Reconocimiento Visual de Modelos , Percepción Visual/fisiologíaRESUMEN
Abnormal emotion processing is a core feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) that encompasses multiple operations. While deficits in some areas have been well-characterized, we understand less about abnormalities in the emotion processing that happens through language, which is highly relevant for social life. Here, we introduce a novel method using deep learning to estimate emotion processing rapidly from spoken language, testing this approach in male-identified patients with SSDs (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 51). Using free responses to evocative stimuli, we derived a measure of appropriateness, or "emotional alignment" (EA). We examined psychometric characteristics of EA and its sensitivity to a single-dose challenge of oxytocin, a neuropeptide shown to enhance the salience of socioemotional information in SSDs. Patients showed impaired EA relative to controls, and impairment correlated with poorer social cognitive skill and more severe motivation and pleasure deficits. Adding EA to a logistic regression model with language-based measures of formal thought disorder (FTD) improved classification of patients versus controls. Lastly, oxytocin administration improved EA but not FTD among patients. While additional validation work is needed, these initial results suggest that an automated assay using spoken language may be a promising approach to assess emotion processing in SSDs.
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Emociones , Oxitocina , Esquizofrenia , Humanos , Masculino , Adulto , Esquizofrenia/fisiopatología , Emociones/fisiología , Persona de Mediana Edad , Oxitocina/administración & dosificación , Aprendizaje Profundo , Psicología del EsquizofrénicoRESUMEN
Schizotypy, a personality structure that resembles schizophrenia symptoms, is often associated with abnormal facial emotion perception. Based on the prevailing sense of threat in psychotic experiences, and the immediate perceptual history of seeing others' facial expressions, individuals with high schizotypal traits may exhibit a heightened tendency to anticipate anger. To test this, we used insights from Representational Momentum (RM), a perceptual phenomenon in which the endpoint of a dynamic event is systematically displaced forward, into the immediate future. Angry-to-ambiguous and happy-to-ambiguous avatar faces were presented, each followed by a probe with the same (ambiguous) expression as the endpoint, or one slightly changed to express greater happiness/anger. Participants judged if the probe was "equal" to the endpoint and rated how confident they were. The sample was divided into high (N = 46) and low (N = 49) schizotypal traits using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). First, a forward bias was found in happy-to-ambiguous faces, suggesting emotional anticipation solely for dynamic faces changing towards a potential threat (anger). This may reflect an adaptative mechanism, as it is safer to anticipate any hostility from a conspecific than the opposite. Second, contrary to our hypothesis, high schizotypal traits did not heighten RM for happy-to-ambiguous faces, nor did they lead to overconfidence in biased judgements. This may suggest a typical pattern of emotional anticipation in non-clinical schizotypy, but caution is needed due to the use of self-report questionnaires, university students, and a modest sample size. Future studies should also investigate if the same holds for clinical manifestations of schizophrenia.
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BACKGROUND: Emotion processing deficits are known to accompany depressive symptoms and are often seen in stroke patients. Little is known about the influence of post-stroke depressive (PSD) symptoms and specific brain lesions on altered emotion processing abilities and how these phenomena develop over time. This potential relationship may impact post-stroke rehabilitation of neurological and psychosocial function. To address this scientific gap, we investigated the relationship between PSD symptoms and emotion processing abilities in a longitudinal study design from the first days post-stroke into the early chronic phase. METHODS: Twenty-six ischemic stroke patients performed an emotion processing task on videos with emotional faces ('happy,' 'sad,' 'anger,' 'fear,' and 'neutral') at different intensity levels (20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%). Recognition accuracies and response times were measured, as well as scores of depressive symptoms (Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale). Twenty-eight healthy participants matched in age and sex were included as a control group. Whole-brain support-vector regression lesion-symptom mapping (SVR-LSM) analyses were performed to investigate whether specific lesion locations were associated with the recognition accuracy of specific emotion categories. RESULTS: Stroke patients performed worse in overall recognition accuracy compared to controls, specifically in the recognition of happy, sad, and fearful faces. Notably, more depressed stroke patients showed an increased processing towards specific negative emotions, as they responded significantly faster to angry faces and recognized sad faces of low intensities significantly more accurately. These effects obtained for the first days after stroke partly persisted to follow-up assessment several months later. SVR-LSM analyses revealed that inferior and middle frontal regions (IFG/MFG) and insula and putamen were associated with emotion-recognition deficits in stroke. Specifically, recognizing happy facial expressions was influenced by lesions affecting the anterior insula, putamen, IFG, MFG, orbitofrontal cortex, and rolandic operculum. Lesions in the posterior insula, rolandic operculum, and MFG were also related to reduced recognition accuracy of fearful facial expressions, whereas recognition deficits of sad faces were associated with frontal pole, IFG, and MFG damage. CONCLUSION: PSD symptoms facilitate processing negative emotional stimuli, specifically angry and sad facial expressions. The recognition accuracy of different emotional categories was linked to brain lesions in emotion-related processing circuits, including insula, basal ganglia, IFG, and MFG. In summary, our study provides support for psychosocial and neural factors underlying emotional processing after stroke, contributing to the pathophysiology of PSD.
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Depresión , Reconocimiento Facial , Humanos , Estudios Longitudinales , Emociones/fisiología , Ira , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagen , Expresión Facial , Reconocimiento Facial/fisiologíaRESUMEN
Emotions are processed in the brain through a cortical route, responsible for detailed-conscious recognition and mainly based on image High Spatial Frequencies (HSF), and a subcortical route, responsible for coarse-unconscious processing and based on Low SF (LSF). However, little is known about possible changes in the functioning of the two routes in ageing. In the present go/no-go online task, 112 younger adults and 111 older adults were asked to press a button when a happy or angry face appeared (go) and to inhibit responses for neutral faces (no-go). Facial stimuli were presented unfiltered (broadband image), filtered at HSF and LSF, and hybrids (LSF of an emotional expression superimposed to the HSF of the same face with a neutral expression). All stimuli were also presented rotated on the vertical axis (upside-down) to investigate the global analysis of faces in ageing. Results showed an overall better performance of younger compared to older participants for all conditions except for hybrid stimuli. The expected face-inversion effect was confirmed in both age groups. We conclude that, besides an overall worsening of the perceptual skill with ageing, no specific impairment in the functioning of both the cortical and the subcortical route emerged.
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Parkinson's Disease (PD) is associated with motor and non-motor symptoms. Among the latter are deficits in matching, identification, and recognition of emotional facial expressions. On one hand, this deficit has been attributed to a dysfunction in emotion processing. Another explanation (which does not exclude the former) links this deficit with reduced facial expressiveness in these patients, which prevents them from properly understanding or embodying emotions. To disentangle the specific contribution of emotion comprehension and that of facial expression processing in PD's observed deficit with emotions we performed two experiments on non-emotional facial expressions. In Experiment 1, a group of PD patients and a group of Healthy Controls (HC) underwent a task of non-emotional expression recognition in faces of different identity and a task of identity recognition in faces with different expression. No differences were observed between the two groups in accuracies. In Experiment 2, PD patients and Healthy Controls underwent a task where they had to recognize the identity of faces encoded through a non-emotional facial expression, through a rigid head movement, or as neutral. Again, no group differences were observed. In none of the two experiments hypomimia scores had a specific effect on expression processing. We conclude that in PD patients the observed impairment with emotional expressions is likely due to a specific deficit for emotions to a greater extent than for facial expressivity processing.
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Cumulating evidence suggests that atypical emotion processing in autism may generalize across different stimulus domains. However, this evidence comes from studies examining explicit emotion recognition. It remains unclear whether domain-general atypicality also applies to implicit emotion processing in autism and its implication for real-world social communication. To investigate this, we employed a novel cross-modal emotional priming task to assess implicit emotion processing of spoken/sung words (primes) through their influence on subsequent emotional judgment of faces/face-like objects (targets). We assessed whether implicit emotional priming differed between 38 autistic and 38 neurotypical individuals across age groups as a function of prime and target type. Results indicated no overall group differences across age groups, prime types, and target types. However, differential, domain-specific developmental patterns emerged for the autism and neurotypical groups. For neurotypical individuals, speech but not song primed the emotional judgment of faces across ages. This speech-orienting tendency was not observed across ages in the autism group, as priming of speech on faces was not seen in autistic adults. These results outline the importance of the delicate weighting between speech- versus song-orientation in implicit emotion processing throughout development, providing more nuanced insights into the emotion processing profile of autistic individuals.
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Trastorno del Espectro Autista , Trastorno Autístico , Adulto , Humanos , Expresión Facial , Emociones , Trastorno Autístico/psicología , JuicioRESUMEN
Refugee children's development may be affected by their parents' war-related trauma exposure and psychopathology symptoms across a range of cognitive and affective domains, but the processes involved in this transmission are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of refugee mothers' trauma exposure and mental health on their children's mental health and attention biases to emotional expressions. In our sample of 324 Syrian refugee mother-child dyads living in Jordan (children's Mage=6.32, SD = 1.18; 50% female), mothers reported on their symptoms of anxiety and depression, and on their children's internalising, externalising, and attention problems. A subset of mothers reported their trauma exposure (n = 133) and PTSD symptoms (n = 124). We examined emotion processing in the dyads using a standard dot-probe task measuring their attention allocation to facial expressions of anger and sadness. Maternal trauma and PTSD symptoms were linked to child internalising and attention problems, while maternal anxiety and depression symptoms were associated with child internalising, externalising, and attention problems. Mothers and children were hypervigilant towards expressions of anger, but surprisingly, mother and child biases were not correlated with each other. The attentional biases to emotional faces were also not linked to psychopathology risk in the dyads. Our findings highlight the importance of refugee mothers' trauma exposure and psychopathology on their children's wellbeing. The results also suggest a dissociation between the mechanisms underlying mental health and those involved in attention to emotional faces, and that intergenerational transmission of mental health problems might involve mechanisms other than attentional processes relating to emotional expressions.
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Ansiedad , Depresión , Emociones , Madres , Refugiados , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático , Humanos , Refugiados/psicología , Femenino , Niño , Masculino , Madres/psicología , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático/psicología , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático/epidemiología , Trastornos por Estrés Postraumático/etnología , Depresión/psicología , Depresión/epidemiología , Jordania/epidemiología , Ansiedad/psicología , Adulto , Relaciones Madre-Hijo/psicología , Siria/etnología , Salud Mental , Preescolar , Trauma Psicológico/psicología , Trauma Psicológico/epidemiología , Trauma Psicológico/etnología , Expresión FacialRESUMEN
Introduction: Emotion processing is an essential part of interpersonal relationships and social interactions. Changes in emotion processing have been found in both mood disorders and in aging, however, the interaction between such factors has yet to be examined in detail. This is of interest due to the contrary nature of the changes observed in existing research - a negativity bias in mood disorders versus a positivity effect with aging. It is also unclear how changes in non-emotional cognitive function with aging and in mood disorders, interact with these biases. Methods and results: In individuals with mood disorders and in healthy control participants, we examined emotional processing and its relationship to age in detail. Data sets from two studies examining facial expression recognition were pooled. In one study, 98 currently depressed individuals (either unipolar or bipolar) were compared with 61 healthy control participants, and in the other, 100 people with bipolar disorder (in various mood states) were tested on the same facial expression recognition task. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to examine the effects of age and mood disorder diagnosis alongside interactions between individual emotion, age, and mood disorder diagnosis. A positivity effect was associated with increasing age which was evident irrespective of the presence of mood disorder or current mood episode. Discussion: Results suggest a positivity effect occurring at a relatively early age but with no evidence of a bias toward negative emotions in mood disorder or specifically, in depressed episodes. The positivity effect in emotional processing in aging appears to occur even within people with mood disorders. Further research is needed to understand how this fits with negative biases seen in previous studies in mood disorders.
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BACKGROUND: Maladaptive behaviors and interpersonal difficulties in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) seem connected to biased facial emotion processing. This bias is often accompanied by heightened amygdala activity in patients with BPD as compared to healthy controls. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies exploring differences between patients and healthy controls in facial emotion processing have produced divergent results. The current study explored fMRI and heart rate variability (HRV) correlates of negative facial emotion processing in patients with BPD and healthy controls. METHODS: The study included 30 patients with BPD (29 females; age: M = 24.22, SD = 5.22) and 30 healthy controls (29 females; M = 24.66, SD = 5.28). All participants underwent the "faces" task, an emotional face perception task, in an fMRI session simultaneously with ECG. In this task, participants are presented with emotional expressions of disgust, sadness, and fear (as a negative condition) and with the same pictures in a scrambled version (as a neutral condition). RESULTS: We found no differences in brain activity between patients with BPD and healthy controls when processing negative facial expressions as compared to neutral condition. We observed activation in large-scale brain areas in both groups when presented with negative facial expressions as compared to neutral condition. Patients with BPD displayed lower HRV than healthy controls in both conditions. However, there were no significant associations between HRV and amygdala activity and BPD symptoms. CONCLUSION: The results of this study indicate no abnormal brain activity during emotional facial processing in patients with BPD. This result contrasts with previous studies and more studies are needed to clarify the relationship between facial emotion processing and brain activity in patients with BPD. Possible reasons for the absence of brain activity differences are discussed in the study. Consistent with previous findings, patients showed lower HRV than healthy controls. However, HRV was not associated with amygdala activity and BPD symptoms.
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BACKGROUND: Previous evidence suggests that early life complications (ELCs) interact with polygenic risk for schizophrenia (SCZ) in increasing risk for the disease. However, no studies have investigated this interaction on neurobiological phenotypes. Among those, anomalous emotion-related brain activity has been reported in SCZ, even if evidence of its link with SCZ-related genetic risk is not solid. Indeed, it is possible this relationship is influenced by non-genetic risk factors. Thus, this study investigated the interaction between SCZ-related polygenic risk and ELCs on emotion-related brain activity. METHODS: 169 healthy participants (HP) in a discovery and 113 HP in a replication sample underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during emotion processing, were categorized for history of ELCs and genome-wide genotyped. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were computed using SCZ-associated variants considering the most recent genome-wide association study. Furthermore, 75 patients with SCZ also underwent fMRI during emotion processing to verify consistency of their brain activity patterns with those associated with risk factors for SCZ in HP. RESULTS: Results in the discovery and replication samples indicated no effect of PRSs, but an interaction between PRS and ELCs in left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), where the greater the activity, the greater PRS only in presence of ELCs. Moreover, SCZ had greater VLPFC response than HP. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that emotion-related VLPFC response lies in the path from genetic and non-genetic risk factors to the clinical presentation of SCZ, and may implicate an updated concept of intermediate phenotype considering early non-genetic factors of risk for SCZ.