Modulating effect of emotional arousal intensity on selective attention in schizophrenia

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 high-arousal 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.