Our work on emotion-based learning has produced a set of interesting findings in people with schizophrenia and in those people in the psychiatrically normal population that show some patterns of thinking reminiscent of schizophrenia, such as magical thinking, and perceptual aberrations/hallucinations – a personality variant some times described as psychology of psychosis-proneness.

Our work has demonstrated that people with schizophrenia show remarkably normal emotion-based learning, but have substantial limitations when required to use such knowledge flexibly. These effects also appear to be present in those exhibiting schizotypy.


Subjective Awareness of the IGT
Evans, C.E.Y., Bowman, C.H. & Turnbull, O.H. (2005). Subjective awareness on the Iowa Gambling Task: The key role of emotional experience in schizophrenia. Journal of Clinical & Experimental Neuropsychology, 27: 656-664.


Schizophrenia and flexible emotion based learning
Turnbull, O.H., Evans, C.E.Y., Kemish, K., Park, S. & Bowman, C.H. (2006). A novel ‘set-shifting’ modification of the Iowa Gambling Task: Flexible emotion-based learning in schizophrenia. Neuropsychology, 20: 290-298.


Schizotypy and flexible learning
Bowman, C. & Turnbull, O.H. (2009). Schizotypy and flexible learning: A pre-requisite of creativity. Philoctetes, 2: 5-30. A Target Paper, published with 9 pages of peer-commentary, by Panksepp and Oppenheim.