The research reveals that the abnormal functional connection of individuals with social pleasure deficit is only related to the expected emotions under social conditions

Emotional expectation is a kind of ability to predict the future emotions of individuals, which affects individual decision-making, motivation, goal-directed behavior and so on It is of great significance to human adaptive function Previous studies have found that schizophrenic patients show impaired emotional expectations, and their defects affect their negative symptoms and daily life functions However, previous studies on the emotional expectation of schizophrenia pedigree pay more attention to clinical patients, while few studies focus on the emotional expectation of high-risk groups of schizophrenia What's more, it's not clear whether the process of individual anticipating positive or negative emotions in the future will be affected by social situations To this end, Chen Chuqiao, a researcher at the Institute of psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, led the team of neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory to carry out a study to explore the characteristics of emotional expectations of people with social pleasure deficit By operating the independent variable of "social situation", the researcher designed a behavioral paradigm of "social emotional expectation" to explore the influence of social situation on the emotional expectation performance of people with social pleasure deficiency A total of 40 people with high scores of social pleasure deficit and 46 control people completed the social emotion expectation behavior test and resting state fMRI scan The results showed that compared with the control group, social pleasure deficit group expected less positive emotions under social conditions, and social pleasure deficit group contained less information about vision, hearing, taste, self-correlation, others' correlation and verbal communication when imagining future events There was a significant positive correlation between the expected positive emotion and motivation level In addition, compared with the control group, the loss of social pleasure group showed the abnormal enhancement of the functional connection between cortex and insula, the abnormal weakening of the functional connection between hippocampal structure and parahippocampal gyrus, and the abnormal functional connection was only significantly related to the expected emotions under social conditions This study shows that the lack of social pleasure in people's emotional expectation mainly exists in social situations The results of this study provide effective suggestions for early identification of disease and non drug intervention The research is supported by NSFC, national key research and development planning project, Beijing Science and Technology Fund and Beijing Science and technology leading talent project The study was published online in schizophrenia research (BIOON Com)