Dataset Information

Neural responses during social reflection in relatives of schizophrenia patients: relationship to subclinical delusions.

ABSTRACT: Deficits in the capacity to reflect about the self and others ("social reflection" [SR]) have been identified in schizophrenia, as well as in people with a genetic or clinical risk for the disorder. However, the neural underpinnings of these abnormalities are incompletely understood.Responses of a network of brain regions known to be involved in self and other processing (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and superior temporal gyrus (STG)) were measured during SR in 16 first-degree, non-psychotic relatives (RELS) of schizophrenia patients and 16 healthy controls (CONS). Because of prior evidence linking dysfunction in this network and delusions, associations between SR-related responses of this network and subclinical delusions (measured using the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory) were also examined.Compared with CONS, RELS showed significantly less SR-related activity of the right and left PCC and STG. Moreover, response magnitudes were negatively correlated with levels of delusional thinking across both groups.These findings suggest that aberrant function of the neural circuitry underpinning SR is associated with the genetic liability to schizophrenia and confers vulnerability to delusional beliefs.

SUBMITTER: Brent BK

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4109724 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural responses during social reflection in relatives of schizophrenia patients: relationship to subclinical delusions.

Brent Benjamin K BK Seidman Larry J LJ Coombs Garth G Keshavan Matcheri S MS Moran Joseph M JM Holt Daphne J DJ

Schizophrenia research 20140617 1-3

<h4>Background</h4>Deficits in the capacity to reflect about the self and others ("social reflection" [SR]) have been identified in schizophrenia, as well as in people with a genetic or clinical risk for the disorder. However, the neural underpinnings of these abnormalities are incompletely understood.<h4>Methods</h4>Responses of a network of brain regions known to be involved in self and other processing (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and superior temp ...[more]

PMID: 24951401

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Project description:Delusions, a core symptom of psychosis, are false beliefs that are rigidly held with strong conviction despite contradictory evidence. Alterations in inferential processes have long been proposed to underlie delusional pathology, but previous attempts to show this have failed to yield compelling evidence for a specific relationship between inferential abnormalities and delusional severity in schizophrenia. Using a novel, incentivized information-sampling task (a modified version of the beads task), alongside well-characterized decision-making tasks, we sought a mechanistic understanding of delusions in a sample of medicated and unmedicated patients with schizophrenia who exhibited a wide range of delusion severity. In this novel task, participants chose whether to draw beads from one of two hidden jars or to guess the identity of the hidden jar, in order to minimize financial loss from a monetary endowment, and concurrently reported their probability estimates for the hidden jar. We found that patients with higher delusion severity exhibited increased information seeking (i.e. increased draws-to-decision behaviour). This increase was highly specific to delusion severity as compared to the severity of other psychotic symptoms, working-memory capacity, and other clinical and socio-demographic characteristics. Delusion-related increases in information seeking were present in unmedicated patients, indicating that they were unlikely due to antipsychotic medication. In addition, after adjusting for delusion severity, patients as a whole exhibited decreased information seeking relative to healthy individuals, a decrease that correlated with lower socioeconomic status. Computational analyses of reported probability estimates further showed that more delusional patients exhibited abnormal belief updating characterized by stronger reliance on prior beliefs formed early in the inferential process, a feature that correlated with increased information seeking in patients. Other decision-making parameters that could have theoretically explained the delusion effects, such as those related to subjective valuation, were uncorrelated with both delusional severity and information seeking among the patients. In turn, we found some preliminary evidence that subjective valuation (rather than belief updating) may explain group differences in information seeking unrelated to delusions. Together, these results suggest that abnormalities in belief updating, characterized by stronger reliance on prior beliefs formed by incorporating information presented earlier in the inferential process, may be a core computational mechanism of delusional ideation in psychosis. Our results thus provide direct empirical support for an inferential mechanism that naturally captures the characteristic rigidity associated with delusional beliefs.

Dataset Information

Neural responses during social reflection in relatives of schizophrenia patients: relationship to subclinical delusions.

Publications

Neural responses during social reflection in relatives of schizophrenia patients: relationship to subclinical delusions.

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