Patients with schizophrenia show impairments in facial emotion recognition, including a proposed negative bias, the misinterpretation of neutral expressions as negative. This bias has been associated with aberrant activation in the amygdala and pSTS and may contribute to the development of persecutory delusions. Here, we present first results from an ongoing, preregistered fMRI-study (https://osf.io/dw2ps/) investigating the negative bias among 21 patients with psychotic disorders (SZ) and 42 healthy controls (HC).

Participants performed an adaptive emotion recognition task involving neutral, angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions. We extracted eigenvariates from the bilateral amygdala and pSTS for each of the facial expressions.

Patients showed reduced overall performance compared to controls, driven by difficulties in identifying anger and fear. Notably, patients showed no stronger negative bias than controls. Eigenvariates showed stronger activation of the amygdala and pSTS across emotions in SZ compared to HC. A significant group*condition interaction emerged for the pSTS, driven by heightened activation for fear and anger in the SZ group. In the SZ group a trend-level association (p = .087) emerged for the association of negative bias and right amygdala activation.

Overall, our preliminary findings suggest emotion recognition impairments in schizophrenia and stress hyper-responsiveness of the pSTS to threat-related stimuli, as well as the amygdala response for the occurrence of a negative bias as a potential target for future studies. Completion of the full sample is necessary to substantiate these conclusions.

Different emotional expressions are conveyed by specific configurations of facial features that enable reliable decoding of others’ emotional states. These features have been shown to attract preferential attention in screen-based laboratory paradigms. However, it remains unclear whether such effects generalize to real-life social interactions and whether individual differences modulate visual attention across contexts. To address this gap, we compared gaze behavior during a computerized task presenting angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions with gaze behavior during a face-to-face interaction in which an experimenter displayed the same emotions in a naturalistic conversation. Although overall face-directed gaze was markedly reduced in the real-life context, we consistently observed increased attention to the eye region for angry expressions and to the mouth region for happy faces across both contexts. Whereas social anxiety did not modulate gaze behavior in the screen-based task, it significantly influenced visual exploration during the naturalistic interaction. Specifically, individuals with higher social anxiety showed stronger attention to emotion-diagnostic facial features than those with lower social anxiety, suggesting heightened sensitivity to emotional cues in live social encounters. Taken together, these findings indicate that while certain aspects of emotion-related visual exploration generalize across controlled and naturalistic contexts, a comprehensive understanding of individual differences in context-dependent gaze behavior requires more interactive paradigms and mobile eye-tracking approaches.

During social interactions, individuals continuously make inferences about others’ intentions, thoughts and feelings. These inferences allow the establishment and maintenance of social relationships, which are essential for social well-being.

Given the importance of social inferences, the interest in biomarkers indicating the success or failure of such inferences has grown. Vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) has recently been proposed to be a promising biomarker for social inferences, especially in the context of social cognition.

Although vmHRV has already been shown to be associated with social cognition, these associations have exclusively been studied during the processing of facial stimuli. Whether similar associations emerge during the processing of more complex stimuli is unclear.

To resolve this issue, we recorded resting-state vmHRV in a large sample of healthy adults before presenting social scenes. During scene processing, adults performed a cognitive and affective empathy task. Adults’ performance on the cognitive, but not affective empathy task was positively associated with their resting-state vmHRV.

Our findings support the notion that vmHRV may serve as a biomarker for social inferences, albeit more in the domain of cognitive than affective empathy.

Loneliness has been associated with alterations in social cognition, including heightened threat sensitivity, negative interpretation biases, and distorted appraisals of others' intentions. These biases may be reflected in how individuals perceive and regulate interpersonal proximity, a dimension of social interaction that remains underexplored in the context of loneliness. Most existing evidence relies on self-report questionnaires and static stimuli, limiting ecological validity and leaving open questions about how loneliness shapes real-time embodied responses to dynamic social stimuli.
This pilot study (N = 20) combines immersive VR, continuous cardiac recording (Polar H10), standardised questionnaires assessing interoception, social cognition, and clinical outcomes, and five-day ecological momentary assessment. In a passive stop-distance task, participants halt approaching avatars at varying speeds while beat-to-beat heart rate is recorded, examining behavioural distance preferences and cardiac correlates of proximity-related threat. Approach speed is varied to probe whether loneliness-related physiological differences are modulated by temporal demands of social threat processing. EMA assesses affect, social appraisals, and perceived interpersonal distance in naturalistic contexts, examining whether lab-derived proximity markers correspond with daily social functioning.
We hypothesise that higher loneliness will associate with larger preferred distances, greater proximity-related discomfort, and altered cardiac responses during avatar approach, and that VR-derived markers will correspond with reduced social engagement and heightened discomfort in daily life. Pilot results and their implications for understanding how loneliness-related biases manifest in embodied spatial behaviour will be discussed. Analysis code is publicly available on GitHub, with cardiac preprocessing via the BBSIG Pipeline and VR task delivery via the EDIA Toolbox.