Emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia.

Social functioning deficits have long been a defining feature in schizophrenia, but relatively little research has examined how emotion responsivity influences functional outcome in this disorder. The goal of the current study was to begin to elucidate the relationships between emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia. Participants were 40 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) and 40 controls. Each participant completed measures of emotion responsivity, social cognition (both emotion and social perception), and functional outcome. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated somewhat reduced emotion responsivity for positive and negative stimuli, as well as deficits in both social cognition and functional outcome, in comparison with controls. Additionally, results indicated that both social perception and emotion responsivity were positively correlated with functional outcome. Importantly, the relationship of emotion responsivity to functional outcome was not mediated by social perception and showed a significant relationship to functional outcome independent of social cognition. This finding suggests that emotion responsivity is an important factor in understanding functional outcome in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identifying and profiling scholastic cheaters: Their personality, cognitive ability, and motivation.

Despite much research, skepticism remains over the possibility of profiling scholastic cheaters. However, several relevant predictor variables and newer diagnostic tools have been overlooked. We remedy this deficit with a series of three studies. Study 1 was a large-scale survey of a broad range of personality predictors of self-reported cheating. Significant predictors included the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) as well as low agreeableness and low conscientiousness. Only psychopathy remained significant in a multiple regression. Study 2 replicated this pattern using a naturalistic, behavioral indicator of cheating, namely, plagiarism as indexed by the Internet service Turn-It-In. Poor verbal ability was also an independent predictor. Study 3 examined possible motivational mediators of the association between psychopathy and cheating. Unrestrained achievement and moral inhibition were successful mediators whereas fear of punishment was not. Practical implications for researchers and educators are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-esteem in schizophrenia: Relationships between self-evaluation, family attitudes, and symptomatology.

Participants with schizophrenia (N=59) were assessed on self-evaluation, symptomatology, and positive and negative affect (expressed emotion) from significant others. An interview-based measure of self-evaluation was used and two independent dimensions of self-esteem were derived: negative and positive evaluation of self. As predicted, negative self-evaluation was strongly associated with positive symptoms, a more critical attitude from family members was associated with greater negative self-evaluation, and analyses supported a model whereby the impact of criticism on patients' positive symptoms was mediated by its association with negative self-evaluation. The interview-based method of self-esteem assessment was found to be superior to the questionnaire because its predictive effects remained after depressed mood was accounted for. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion deficits in schizophrenia: Timing matters.

The past two decades of research on emotional response in schizophrenia has demonstrated that people with schizophrenia do not have a marked deficit in reported emotional experience in the presence of emotionally evocative stimuli. However, the extent to which people with schizophrenia maintain their emotional state to guide future behavior remains a largely unexplored area of investigation. In the present study, we tested hypotheses about whether people with schizophrenia maintained their emotional state in the absence of emotionally evocative stimuli. In addition to reported emotional experience, we measured startle response magnitude both during the viewing and after the offset of emotional pictures to assess whether people with schizophrenia (n = 31) and without schizophrenia (n = 28) differ in their patterns of immediate response to emotional pictures and in their patterns of maintenance of these responses. Our findings indicated that people with and without schizophrenia did not differ in their self-report or startle response magnitude during presentation of emotional pictures. However, healthy controls maintained these responses after the stimuli were removed from view, but people with schizophrenia did not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation as predictors of reading literacy: A longitudinal study.

The purpose in this study was to examine the longitudinal relationships of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation with reading literacy development. In particular, the authors (a) investigated reading amount as mediator between motivation and reading literacy and (b) probed for bidirectional relationships between reading motivation and reading literacy, controlling for previous reading literacy. A total of 740 students participated in a longitudinal assessment starting in Grade 3, with further points of measurement in Grades 4 and 6. Structural equation models with latent variables showed that the relationship between intrinsic reading motivation and later reading literacy was mediated by reading amount but not when previous reading literacy was included in the model. A bidirectional relationship was found between extrinsic reading motivation and reading literacy: Grade 3 reading literacy negatively predicted extrinsic reading motivation in Grade 4, which in turn negatively predicted reading literacy in Grade 6. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Delusional thinking and cognitive organization in schizophrenia.

A delusion can be conceptualized as a form of cognitive reorganization; according to this interpretation a delusion serves to integrate into a meaningful and acceptable whole data which otherwise would be anxiety provoking. On the assumption that the utilization of delusions is representative of a generalized cognitive technique for dealing with ambiguous inputs it was hypothesized that delusional schizophrenics should manifest a stronger tendency to integrate ambiguous stimuli in a laboratory situation than nondelusional schizophrenics. To test the hypothesis 24 delusional and 25 nondelusional schizophrenics were compared on the McGill Closure Test. The results supported the hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Achievement-Based Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation: A Test of Cognitive Mediators.

This study assessed how rewards impacted intrinsic motivation when students were rewarded for achievement while learning an activity, for performing at a specific level on a test, or for both. Undergraduate university students engaged in a problem-solving activity. The design was a 2 × 2 factorial with 2 levels of reward in a learning phase (reward for achievement, no reward) and 2 levels of reward in a test phase (reward for achievement, no reward). Intrinsic motivation was measured as time spent on the experimental task and ratings of task interest during a free-choice period. A major finding was that achievement-based rewards during learning or testing increased participants' intrinsic motivation. A path analysis indicated that 2 processes (perceived competence and interest-internal attribution) mediated the positive effects of achievement-based rewards in learning and testing on intrinsic motivation. Findings are discussed in terms of the cognitive evaluation, attribution, and social-cognitive theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrity of emotional and motivational states during the prodromal, first-episode, and chronic phases of schizophrenia.

Emotional and motivational dysfunction is fundamental to schizophrenia, and yet, the nature and scope of associated deficits are not well understood. This study assessed the integrity of emotional responding from the perspective of its underlying motivational systems during different phases of schizophrenia. Evaluative, somatic, and autonomic responses were measured during viewing of pictures categorized by emotional content, including threat, mutilation, contamination, illness, pollution, mild erotica, families, food, and nature. Participants were 13 patients at ultra high risk or prodromal for psychosis, 40 first-episode schizophrenia patients, 37 chronic schizophrenia patients, and 74 healthy comparison subjects. Irrespective of phase of illness, schizophrenia patients showed a robust and normal pattern of response across multiple systems, with differential engagement of the defensive and appetitive systems as a function of the motivational significance assigned to specific emotional contexts. Although the integrity of core motivational states also appeared to be intact in prodromal patients, a less consistent pattern of response was observed. As continuing efforts are made to identify emotional and motivational abnormalities in schizophrenia, identified deficits will likely be independent of a fundamental dysfunction in basic emotion and motivation response systems and involve integration with higher order processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response to cognitive therapy in depression: The role of maladaptive beliefs and personality disorders.

This study examined whether personality disorder status and beliefs that characterize personality disorders affect response to cognitive therapy. In a naturalistic study, 162 depressed outpatients with and without a personality disorder were followed over the course of cognitive therapy. As would be hypothesized by cognitive theory (A. T. Beck & A. Freeman, 1990), it was not personality disorder status but rather maladaptive avoidant and paranoid beliefs that predicted variance in outcome. However, pre- to posttherapy comparisons suggested that although patients with or without comorbidity respond comparably to "real-world" cognitive therapy, they report more severe depressive symptomatology at intake and more residual symptoms at termination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability to depression: Temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood as contributors to negative cognitive style.

Cognitive models of depression have been well supported with adults, but the developmental origins of cognitive vulnerability are not well understood. The authors hypothesized that temperament, parenting, and negative life events in childhood would contribute to the development of cognitive style, with withdrawal negativity and negative parental feedback moderating the effects of negative life events to predict more depressogenic cognitive styles. These constructs were assessed in 289 children and their parents followed longitudinally from infancy to 5th grade; a subsample (n = 120) also participated in a behavioral task in which maternal feedback to child failure was observed. Results indicated that greater withdrawal negativity in interaction with negative life events was associated with more negative cognitive styles. Self-reported maternal anger expression and observed negative maternal feedback to child's failure significantly interacted with child's negative events to predict greater cognitive vulnerability. There was little evidence of paternal parenting predicting child negative cognitive style. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Crystallized verbal skills in schizophrenia: Relationship to neurocognition, symptoms, and functional status.

Objective: To study the relationship of superior (i.e., ≥ 90th percentile), average (11th?89th percentile) or extremely low (i.e., ≤ 10th percentile) crystallized verbal skills to neurocognitive profiles, symptoms and everyday life function in schizophrenia. Method: Crystallized verbal skill was derived from Vocabulary subtest scores from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Out of a sample of 165 stable outpatients with schizophrenia we identified 25 participants with superior crystallized verbal skill, 104 participants with average verbal skill, and 36 participants with extremely low crystallized verbal skill. Each participant was administered measures of attention, working memory, verbal learning and memory, problem-solving and processing speed, as well as symptom and performance-based adaptive life skill assessments. Results: The magnitude of neuropsychological impairment across the three groups was different, after adjusting for group differences in education and duration of illness. Working memory, and verbal learning and memory skills were different across all three groups, while processing speed differentiated the extremely low verbal skill group from the other two groups and problem-solving differentiated the very low verbal skill group from the superior verbal skill group. There were no group differences in sustained attention. Capacity measures of everyday life skills were different across each of the three groups. Conclusion: Crystallized verbal skill in schizophrenia is related to the magnitude of impairment in neurocognitive function and performance-based skills in everyday life function. Patterns of neuropsychological impairment were similar across different levels of crystallized verbal skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Everyday action in schizophrenia: Performance patterns and underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Everyday action is impaired among individuals with schizophrenia, yet few studies have characterized the nature of this deficit using performance-based measures. This study examined the performance of 20 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder on the Naturalistic Action Test (M. F. Schwartz, L. J. Buxbaum, M. Ferraro, T. Veramonti, & M. Segal, 2003). Performance was coded to examine overall impairment, task accomplishment, and error patterns and was compared with that of healthy controls (n = 28) and individuals with mild dementia (n = 23). Additionally, 2 competing accounts of everyday action deficits, the resource theory and an executive account, were evaluated. When compared with controls, the participants with schizophrenia demonstrated impaired performance. Relative to dementia patients, participants with schizophrenia obtained higher accomplishment scores but committed comparable rates of errors. Moreover, distributions of error types for the 2 groups differed, with the participants with schizophrenia demonstrating greater proportions of errors associated with executive dysfunction. This is the 1st study to show different Naturalistic Action Test performance patterns between 2 neurologically impaired populations. The distinct performance pattern demonstrated by individuals with schizophrenia reflects specific deficits in executive function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How to fill a half-full glass: Emotion and schizophrenia.

The authors comment on the article "The primacy of cognition in schizophrenia," by R. W. Heinrichs (see record 2005-03019-003). They state that Heinrichs persuasively argued as to the primacy of cognition in schizophrenia by citing an impressive body of evidence in favor of the view that schizophrenia is a complex biobehavioral disorder that manifests itself primarily in cognition. His conclusion is something of an anticlimax. At the same time, however, he acknowledged that "the glass of evidence is half empty as well as half full" (Heinrichs, 2005, p. 238). That is to say, the symptoms that mark out schizophrenia--the hallucinations, delusions, and so forth--do not appear to map onto cognitive deficits, or at least they do not map onto those that are measured with traditional neuropsychological tests. To fill the other half of the glass, the authors propose that a focus on emotion (largely neglected in the target article) will be of crucial importance. Furthermore, they commend the methods of cognitive neuropsychiatry as being eminently suitable to guide this research. The authors briefly illustrate the value of this approach with reference to affective characteristics of hallucinations and cognitive-emotional interactions in source monitoring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Direct measurement of differential cognitive deficit in acute schizophrenia.

This is a longitudinal study in which 11 standardized tests of cognitive function were administered to 20,000 normal Ss and at a later point in time readministered to those Ss of the original group (N=15) who became schizophrenic and were hospitalized. The tests were also readministered to part of the original group (N=40) who, at the same point in time, were still normal. The results, which revealed significant differential deficit on 5 of the measures, suggest that lack of motivation to reach out and actively manipulate stimuli or experience new learning produced the differences observed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scanning-control mechanism and "cognitive filtering" in paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenia.

Recent studies of individual consistencies in cognitive behavior, termed studies of "cognitive controls," have emphasized the importance of differing characterological response dispositions which also serve ego defensive functions. This report concerned 2 such response dispositions—extensiveness of scanning and breadth of categorization. Highly significant differences in scanning behavior, inferred from performances on a certain form of size-estimation procedure, were found between paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics. Significant differences were also found between the groups on a measure of breadth of categorization. These findings were discussed in terms of some developmental aspects of the 2 cognitive controls and also in terms of the relevance of these findings to a theory of delusional thinking. (22 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivation and performance in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenic patients and normals learned a series of motor responses to successively presented visual stimuli; the schizophrenics and normals were each divided into 2 groups, Shock and Rapport, matched on an initial test, Pattern I. The shock groups were each tested on two subsequent tasks, Patterns II and III. "The results showed a differential facilitative effect of the shock stimulation for the schizophrenic patients on Pattern III but not on Pattern II. The schizophrenic rapport group declined in efficiency from Pattern II to III, a result not seen in the shock group of patients or in either normal group. These findings were interpreted in terms of an inferred process of motivational dissipation during performance in schizophrenia." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship of personality to performance motivation: A meta-analytic review.

This article provides a meta-analysis of the relationship between the 5-factor model of personality and 3 central theories of performance motivation (goal-setting, expectancy, and self-efficacy motivation). The quantitative review includes 150 correlations from 65 studies. Traits were organized according to the 5-factor model of personality. Results indicated that Neuroticism (average validity=-.31) and Conscientiousness (average validity=.24) were the strongest and most consistent correlates of performance motivation across the 3 theoretical perspectives. Results further indicated that the validity of 3 of the Big Five traits--Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness--generalized across studies. As a set, the Big 5 traits had an average multiple correlation of .49 with the motivational criteria, suggesting that the Big 5 traits are an important source of performance motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stability of cognitive vulnerabilities to depression: A short-term prospective multiwave study.

The stability of 3 cognitive vulnerabilities--a negative cognitive style, dysfunctional attitudes, and rumination--as well as depressive symptoms as a benchmark were examined to investigate whether cognitive vulnerabilities are stable, enduring risks for depression. A sample of adolescents (6th-10th graders) completed measures of these 3 cognitive vulnerabilities and depressive symptoms every 5 weeks for 4 waves of data across 5 months. Mean-level and differential stability were examined for the sample overall and by age subgroups. A negative cognitive style exhibited mean-level stability, whereas rumination and dysfunctional attitudes showed some mean-level change. Absolute magnitudes of test-retest reliabilities were strong for depressive symptoms (mean r = .70), moderately high for a negative cognitive style (mean r = .52), and more modest for rumination (mean r = .28) and dysfunctional attitudes (mean r = .26). Structural equation modeling showed that primarily enduring processes, but not contextual forces, contributed to the patterning of these test-retest reliabilities over time for a negative cognitive style and dysfunctional attitudes, whereas both enduring and contextual dynamics appeared to underlie the stability for rumination. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual recognition as a function of anxiety, motivation, and the testing situation.

The hypothesis was made that degree of anxiety and motivation would influence S's performance on tasks measuring skill in discovering objects embedded in a stimulus field, particularly as the situation was structured to be stressful or not. Ss low in anxiety and high in motivation performed significantly better than Ss high in anxiety but with low motivation. In the nonstressful situation, Ss low in anxiety and motivation performed significantly poorer than their counterparts. It is recommended, therefore, that situational task variables be considered as crucial factors in analysing behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in cognitive content during and following cognitive therapy for recurrent depression: Substantial and enduring, but not predictive of change in depressive symptoms.

The authors examined the amount and durability of change in the cognitive content of 156 adult outpatients with recurrent major depressive disorder after treatment with cognitive therapy. The pre-post magnitude of change was large for the Attributional Style Questionnaire Failure composite (d = 0.79), Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (d = 1.05), and Self-Efficacy Scale (d = 0.83), and small for the Attributional Style Questionnaire Success composite (d = 0.30). Changes in cognitive content were clinically significant, as defined by their 64%-87% scores overlapping with score distributions from community dwellers. Improvement was durable over a 2-year follow-up. Changes in negative cognitive content could be detected early and distinguished responders from nonresponders. In responders, continuation-phase cognitive therapy was associated with further improvements on only 1 measure of cognitive content. Early changes in negative cognitive content did not predict later changes in depressive symptoms, which the authors discuss in the context of methodological challenges and the cognitive theory of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)