11. Psychology, Neuro- 139 seen in schizophrenia may not be unique to the disorder and perhaps related to the presence of psychosis. More importantly, past or pres- ent psychosis may parallel a continuum of global neuropsychologi- cal dysfunction that includes both schizophrenia and affective dis- orders with psychosis. EFFECTS OF ESTROGEN AUGMENTATION ON COGNITION AND SYMPTOMS IN FEMALE SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS A. L. Hoff,* M. H. Wieneke, W. S. Kremen, S. Espinoza, W. Liu, T. E. Nordahl Psychiatry, UC Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA, USA In a previous study (Hoff et al., 2001), we found that average estro- gen level (based on 4 weekly blood draws) was strongly related to cognitive function in a group of female schizophrenia inpatients (rs with global cognitive index=.86). The purpose of the current study was to determine if estrogen augmentation would improve neu- ropsychological function and reduce psychiatric symptoms in a sim- ilar group of patients. The study was a single-blind study of five female patients (average age = 43 + 7.4 years) who received 1 rag. of Estrace (micronized estradiol) for 12 weeks, followed by 13 days of progesterone. All received SCID diagnoses of schizophrenia. A comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests (most with alter- nate forms) was administered and psychiatric symptoms were rated (PANSS, SANS, SAPS) before and after estrogen treatment. Despite a significant increase in estrogen levels from pre- to post-testing, there were no significant changes in cognitive function and symp- toms were not improved. While our preliminary data yielded nega- tive results, future studies may need to consider higher estrogen dos- es, longer duration of treatment, or study less severely ill patients (e.g. outpatients). Supported by the Faculty-Alumni Research Devel- opment Award, UC Davis School of Medicine and Department of Mental Health, State of California Hoff, A.L., Kremen, W.S., Wieneke, M.H., Lauriello, J., Blankfeld, H.M., Faustman, W.O., Csernansky, J.G., Nordahl, T.E. (2001) Association of estrogen lev- els with neuropsychological performance in women with schizo- phrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry. 158:1 t34-1139. NEUROCOGNITIVE CHANGES IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: CORRELATES AND FUNCTIONAL CONSEQUENCES E. A. Holthausen,* D. Wiersma, N. E. van Haren, W. Cahn, R. S. Kahn, R. J. van den Bosch Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands' Neurocognitive deficits are a major characteristic in first onset schiz- ophrenia. However, because most changes in schizophrenia take place during the first two to five years of illness we shifted our atten- tion from fixed deficits to dynamic neurocogntive changes and their correlates. In this study 70 first episode patients were tested at inclu- sion and after four years on a large cognitive battery measuring vig- ilance, speed of information processing, selective attention, verbal learning, verbal fluency and intelligence. Outcome measures were course of illness, cornorbidity in terms of substance abuse, work sta- tus and social functioning. Results were used to study changes in cognition for the whole group and associations between neurocog- nitive changes and outcome variables. There were no significant changes in cognition for the whole group. On an individual level however some patients showed improvement and some deteriorated on cognitive measures. Some of these changes were significantly associated with outcome. Especially deterioration in intelligence scores was associated with chronicity, substance abuse and poor work status, while there was no such association with the fixed measures of intelligence at illness onset. The question remains whether this association between decline in intelligence scores and a chronic course of illness reflects a deteriorative process or is caused by neu- roplasticity due to poor social-environmental stimulation. MUSIC PERCEPTION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: ALTERED PREFERENCE FOR ATONAL VERSUS TONAL SOUNDS R. Honea,* L. Borden, S. Park Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA Background: Theories that link laterality, sex difference and origins of schizophrenia have exclusively focused on language, but music shares the same fundamental features that make language special within the context of human evolution: structural complexity, rich- hess of syntax, acoustic variations and social role. Music and lan- guage share overlapping representations in the same hemisphere and have corresponding homologous localizations in the opposite hemi- sphere. In addition, lateralization for music and language interact with sex. In this study we examined tonal vs atonal preference, because it is an ability that may be hard-wired. It has bcen suggest- ed that differential firing patterns in the auditory cortex are linked to the perception of dissonance. Moreover, emotional responses to con- sonant vs dissonant chords involve different neural activation pat- terns. Method: Schizophrenia patients (SCZ) and age-, education- and verbal IQ-matcbed healthy controls (NC) participated in pitch discrimination, melody recognition and chord preference tasks. Sub- jects had no formal music training, and normal hearing. All subjects performed almost perfectly on the first two tasks. In the chord pref- erence task, subjects were asked to listen to chord pairs and indicate their preference. The stimuli were controlled for beat, intensity, dig- italizafion, and frequency. There were 6 possible chords ranging from perfectly consonant (e.g. CEG) to very dissonant (e.g. CDG). We examined frequency of preference for more tonal chords (%prefcon), frequency of no preference for tonally equal chords (%nopref), and frequency of choosing dissonant over consonant chords (%prefdiss). Results: There was no main effect of diagnosis on % prefcon but there was a significant interaction between diagnosis and sex such that in the NC group, women outperformed men but in the SCZ group, men were more accurate than women. We found exactly the same pattern of significant interaction of diagnosis by sex in the %nopref; NC men showed a greater tendency to chose dissonant over consonant chords compared with NC women. In SCZ, this pattern was reversed. Discussion: These results suggest that preference for consonant chords, an integral component of music processing, is altered in schizophrenia but it depends on gender. Further investiga- tion into music perception may lead to new insights regarding the origins and neurobiology of schizophrenia NEGATIVE PRIMING IN FIRST EPISODE PSYCHOSIS R. S. Hopkins,* S. W. Lewis School of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, 1'he University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom Introduction: reductions in negative priming in schizophrenia have been variably reported. The selection of cases and the phase of illness International Congress on Schizophrenia Research 2003