Original title: Cognitive Control Neural Correlates of Negative Affective in Psychosis Spectrum Disorders: A Laboratory and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study
Takakuni Suzuki, Margo W. Menkes, Maureen Walton, Melvin G McInnis +4 · September 2026
People with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders often experience intense negative emotions. These feelings can show up as long-term traits or daily moods. Researchers wanted to know how brain activity linked to cognitive control—the mind's ability to focus and manage reactions—relates to this distress. They tracked daily feelings on participants' phones and measured brain waves using electroencephalography while people did focus tests. These tests used neutral, unpleasant, and pleasant images. They found that participants with schizophrenia or bipolar spectrum disorders had higher negative traits, lower extraversion and conscientiousness, higher psychoticism, and more daily emotional ups and downs. Schizophrenia participants also dealt with more unpleasant daily events and tried harder to avoid them. Specific brain waves, called theta-band powerA measure of brain wave activity in the theta frequency range (about 4-8 Hz), often linked to attention and cognitive control., matched people's negative traits and their reactions to stressful moments. This shows that certain control-related brain signals track negative moods across both conditions, pointing to how stress sensitivity works in the brain.
Imagine you are trying to listen to a friend in a noisy café. Normally you can tune out the background chatter and focus on their voice. But if the noise itself changes unpredictably—sometimes loud, sometimes soft—your ability to focus breaks down. In this paper, the brain's ability to filter out distractions (like ignoring arrows) is linked to how people experience negative emotions in daily life, and that link is strongest when the task itself is emotionally charged.
For people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, intense negative emotions are common and hard to manage. This study shows that a specific brain signal during a simple attention task is linked to those daily emotional experiences. That signal could become a target for tracking or treating emotional distress in these conditions.
The study is correlational, so it cannot prove that theta-band power causes negative affect. The sample size is moderate (105 participants), and only specific EEG measures (theta power from arrow and unpleasant tasks) showed associations; other measures like ERPs and theta phase did not. The findings are limited to the specific tasks and EMA protocol used, and replication is needed to confirm transdiagnostic relevance.
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Cognitive Control Neural Correlates of Negative Affective in Psychosis Spectrum Disorders: A Laboratory and Ecological Momentary Assessment Study — Takakuni Suzuki, Margo W. Menkes, Maureen Walton et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/f7yzs_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.