Campus Contact Information Departmental Area(s): Clinical Science (Area Head); Social/Personality;Behavioral Neuroscience Director: Emotion and Social Interaction Laboratory Interests: Psychopathology. Emotional features of schizophrenia, the linkage between emotion and other cognitive and social deficits in schizophrenia, emotion, social interaction, and social anxiety, emotion, and depression. Emotion: individual differences in emotional expression, gender and emotion, the relationship between social context, personality, and emotion.

Ann M. Kring's broad interests are in emotion and psychopathology. Specific interests include the emotional features of schizophrenia, assessing negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and the linkage between cognition and emotion in schizophrenia. In addition, Dr. Kring studies emotion in healthy individuals, with a focus on individual differences in expressive behavior, gender differences in emotion, and the linkages between cognition, personality, social context, and emotion.

Dr. Kring and her research group have been studying the nature of emotion disturbance in schizophrenia, observing a couple of emotional disconnections in this population. First, people with schizophrenia show less observable facial expression despite reporting equally intense amounts of experienced emotion compared to people without schizophrenia. Second, people with schizophrenia score higher than people without schizophrenia on clinical measures of anhedonia, indicating a reduction in the experience of pleasure, yet they report experiencing comparable amounts of pleasant emotions in daily life and in the presence of pleasant stimuli. A primary focus of her research program has been to uncover the mechanisms driving these emotion disconnections in schizophrenia. Ongoing studies are designed to assess the nature of anhedonia in schizophrenia, examining anticipatory pleasure (i.e., pleasure in anticipation of future events as well as the ability to predict whether future events will be pleasurable), anticipatory pleasure across cultural contexts (in collaboration with Dr. Raymond Chan at the Chinese Academy of Sciences), consummatory pleasure (i.e., pleasure in the moment), and memory for pleasurable events. Other studies are examining emotional responding among women with schizophrenia, an area that has not been well investigated.

Drawing upon this basic work on emotion in schizophrenia, Dr. Kring is working collaboratively with three other investigators (Dr. Jack Blanchard at University of Maryland; Dr. Raquel Gur at University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Bill Horan at UCLA) to validate a newly developed clinical rating scale for negative symptoms. This multi-site NIMH funded study will evaluate the psychometric properties, test-retest reliability, and convergent/discriminant validity of a newly developed rating scale, the Negative Symptom Rating Scale (NSRS) and impose data-driven refinements of the instrument based on state-of-the-art data analytic techniques in large ethnically and clinically diverse samples.

An additional focus has been on the ways in which emotion can facilitate different types of cognitive processing in schizophrenia, such as attention and working memory, as well as the ways in which these cognitive processes can facilitate emotional processing. Current work in collaboration with investigators at UC Davis and funded by NIMH is examining the neural underpinnings of the maintenance of emotional responses in schizophrenia using fMRI and how maintenance deficits may be connected to deficits in cognitive control.

Dr. Kring is also collaborating with Drs. David Penn and Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to develop and test a new psychosocial intervention for negative symptoms in schizophrenia. This group treatment, termed emotion focused medication (EFM), builds on existing forms of meditation (loving kindness) and basic affective science research on positive emotion to help people with schizophrenia identify emotions, savor emotions, and use emotions to guide their decisions and behavior in daily life.