Differential deficits in social versus monetary reinforcement learning in schizophrenia: Associations with facial emotion recognition.

Despite evidence that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) have an intact desire for social relationships, they have small social networks and report high levels of loneliness. Difficulty with reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to update behavior based on feedback, may inhibit the formation and maintenance of social relationships in SZ. However, impaired RL in SZ has largely been demonstrated via monetary tasks.

Grant Report on Social Reward Learning in Schizophrenia .

We report on the ongoing R21 project "Social Reward Learning in Schizophrenia". Impairments in social cognition are a hallmark of schizophrenia. However, little work has been done on social reward learning deficits in schizophrenia.

Psychotic like experiences as part of a continuum of psychosis: Associations with effort-based decision-making and reward responsivity.

Research examining psychotic disorders typically involves comparison between individuals with a clinical disorder and healthy controls. However, research suggests that psychotic symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations, may exist on a continuum ranging from variation in healthy individuals to diagnosable psychotic disorders. On this continuum, some individuals endorse occasional psychotic like experiences (PLEs) that do not cause sufficient impairment or distress to warrant a clinical diagnosis.

Self versus informant reports on the specific levels of functioning scale: Relationships to depression and cognition in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

The goal of the current study was to examine the relationships between insight and both cognitive function and depression in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, and to determine if there were similar relationships across diagnostic categories. We examined discrepancies between self and informant reports of function on the Specific levels of function scale as a metric of insight for interpersonal, social acceptance, work and activities. We examined two samples of individuals with schizophrenia and/or schizoaffective disorder (Ns of 188 and 67 respectively).