Person:

Tully, Laura Magdalen

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. Twenty-three patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces following negative affective primes as less trustworthy than faces following neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for participants with schizophrenia, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterized by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia.

Social functioning impairments are a core, debilitating, and treatment refractory feature of schizophrenia. The mechanisms contributing to these impairments are unknown. Cognitive control mechanisms, mediated by the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), are known to influence response to interpersonal stressors in healthy individuals, thus impairments in these processes may contribute to social deficits. Deficits in cognitive control and lateral prefrontal abnormalities are well-documented in schizophrenia, but the relationship between these deficits and social interactions has received limited attention in the literature. The current dissertation presents a systematic examination of the contribution of the behavioral and neural mechanisms of cognitive control to social functioning impairments in schizophrenia. Three papers are presented.