Emotion Endophenotypes in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is an invalidating psychiatric illness with a strong genetic component characterized by abnormal processing of emotional information. This alteration in emotion processing has been described in acute as well as in remission phases of the illness. It has also been found in healthy relatives of patients with schizophrenia and in subjects at high risk of psychosis. Thus, alterations in emotional information processing are not only linked to the prognosis but can also be considered as a marker of vulnerability of schizophrenia. In addition, schizophrenia patients differ from healthy controls in neural activity in brain regions implicated in emotions processing. However, interpretation of findings in patients is limited by confounding factors, such as antipsychotic treatments or alterations due to the course of illness. Also, there is no data concerning genetic factors (polymorphisms or gene expression) underlying these patterns of cerebral activation in emotion information processing. So, the main objective of this study is to compare the cerebral activity of schizophrenia patients to that of healthy siblings and healthy controls in an emotional processing task.