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Schizotypal personality traits and the social learning of fear.

ABSTRACT: Schizotypy can be defined as a combination of traits qualitatively similar to those found in schizophrenia, but milder in their expression, that can be found in clinical and non-clinical populations. In this research, we explore, to our knowledge, for the first time, whether schizotypal personality traits may affect the acquisition of conditioned fear by social means only. Apart from being an essential capacity to ensure learning in safe environments, social fear learning shares important characteristics with direct fear acquisition, which also makes it a great candidate for developing successful extinction procedures. Undergraduate students (n = 72) performed a task of social fear learning. In this task, participants watched a video of a person that simulated to receive electric shocks (unconditioned stimulus; US) paired with a coloured square (conditioned stimulus plus; CS+), while another coloured square was never paired (conditioned stimulus minus; CS-) with the shock. After that, they were presented with a similar sequence of coloured screens. Their Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs) were registered during the whole process. Once they finished, they completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). Our results revealed that participants with a low score in the Cognitive-Perceptual factor of the SPQ exhibited higher SCRs when they saw the US than when they saw the CS- (all ps < 0.01) during the learning phase. Nevertheless, those with higher scores did not present any difference in their SCRs toward both stimuli (all ps > 0.05), a pattern that has been similarly found in schizophrenia. During the final trials of the test phase, participants with the highest scores in the Disorganized factor were the only ones that maintained a higher SCR towards the CS+ than towards the CS- (p = 0.006), which could be associated with an impairment in their extinction processes.

SUBMITTER: Gonzalez-Rodriguez A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8630166 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Perceptual organization (PO) difficulties have repeatedly been reported in people with schizophrenia, and in healthy individuals with high levels of schizotypy traits, who are at increased risk for schizophrenia. In particular, poor performance on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) has been interpreted as an atypically strong preference for global over local processing, even though these processes cannot be clearly disambiguated on this test. Here we use two separate versions of the Radial Frequency Search Task (RFST), a new index of PO abilities, to selectively investigate global and local processing of shape information in trait schizotypy. Schizotypy traits were assessed using the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales-Brief. Individuals selected for high and low levels of positive schizotypy [assessed with the Wisconsin Schizotypy Scales-Brief Perceptual Aberration (PAb) scale] completed the EFT, along with the Global RFST and the Local RFST, all of which require participants to find a target shape amongst distractor elements. The High PAb group (n = 83) were less efficient (i.e., reactions times slowed more as the set size increased) than the Low PAb group (n = 146) on the Global RFST (significant group differences for Target Absent conditions only), but not the Local RFST. High and Low PAb groups also differed on other schizotypy traits, so the specificity of the results to positive schizotypy cannot be assured. Unexpectedly, no group differences were observed on the EFT; however, there was a small, but significant, positive correlation between RFST search efficiency and EFT performance, indicating that they shared some common processes. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that global (but not local) processing difficulties may be contributing to the poorer perceptual organization observed in groups with high levels of schizotypy traits. In addition, the confinement of this result to the Target Absent condition suggests that the underlying mechanism involves differences in decisional processes on the RFST between high and low schizotypy groups. The RFST shows promise as a useful tool for measuring specific perceptual organization abilities in non-clinical, and potentially clinical, samples.

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Schizotypal personality traits and the social learning of fear.

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