Auditory and Visual Oddball Stimulus Processing Deficits in Schizophrenia and the Psychosis Risk Syndrome: Forecasting Psychosis Risk With P300.

Identification of neurophysiological abnormalities associated with schizophrenia that predate and predict psychosis onset may improve clinical prediction in the psychosis risk syndrome (PRS) and help elucidate the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. Amplitude reduction of the P300 event-related potential component reflects attention-mediated processing deficits and is among the most replicated biological findings in schizophrenia, making it a candidate biomarker of psychosis risk. The relative extent to which deficits in P300 amplitudes elicited by auditory and visual oddball stimuli precede psychosis onset during the PRS and predict transition to psychosis, however, remains unclear.

Clinical and cognitive correlates of unsheltered status in homeless persons with psychotic disorders.

Homeless persons with psychosis are particularly susceptible to unsheltered homelessness, which includes living on the streets, in cars, and other places not meant for human habitation. Homeless persons with psychosis have distinct barriers to accessing care and comprise a high-need and hard-to-serve homeless subpopulation. Therefore, this study sought to understand unsheltered homelessness in persons with psychosis and its relationship to cognitive impairment, clinical symptoms, and community functioning, examined both categorically and dimensionally.

The role of experiential and expressive negative symptoms on job obtainment and work outcome in individuals with schizophrenia.

Unemployment rates for schizophrenia are high across all age groups compared to the general population. Past studies have focused on neurocognition as a key determinant of unemployment and poor work outcome in schizophrenia. However, several recent studies suggest that clinical symptoms may be equally or more important than cognitive dysfunction for understanding employment difficulties.

Predictors of employment in schizophrenia: The importance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Unemployment is a primary functional deficit for the majority of adults with schizophrenia. Research indicates that over two-thirds of adults living in the community with schizophrenia are unemployed. Despite effective programs to assist with job identification and placement, the ability to attain and maintain employment remains a pressing concern.

Patterns and reliability of EEG during error monitoring for internal versus external feedback in schizophrenia.

Background: Accurately monitoring one's performance on daily life tasks, and integrating internal and external performance feedback are necessary for guiding productive behavior. Although internal feedback processing, as indexed by the error-related negativity (ERN), is consistently impaired in schizophrenia, initial findings suggest that external performance feedback processing, as indexed by the feedback negativity (FN), may actually be intact. The current study evaluated internal and external feedback processing task performance and test-retest reliability in schizophrenia.

The "Right Stuff" Revisited: What Have We Learned About the Determinants of Daily Functioning in Schizophrenia?

It has been about 15 years since we published our article asking whether we are measuring the "Right Stuff" as we search for predictors and determinants of functional outcome in schizophrenia. At that time, we raised the question as to whether the neurocognitive assessments used to study outcome in schizophrenia were too narrow to capture the wide variability in factors that determine daily functioning. While the study of the determinants of functioning in schizophrenia has grown and matured, we are struck by 3 aspects of the article that evolved in different directions.

The processing of emotional stimuli during periods of limited attentional resources in schizophrenia.

When participants are asked to attend to two target stimuli in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence, the successful identification of the 1st target (T1) leads to transient impairment in reporting the 2nd target (T2)--this effect is known as the attentional blink (AB). In healthy individuals, this AB effect is either diminished or accentuated when emotional stimuli are presented in the T2 or T1 positions, respectively, suggesting that affective content influences bottom-up (i.e.

The Motivation and Pleasure Scale-Self-Report (MAP-SR): reliability and validity of a self-report measure of negative symptoms.

The Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms (CAINS) is an empirically developed interview measure of negative symptoms. Building on prior work, this study examined the reliability and validity of a self-report measure based on the CAINS-the Motivation and Pleasure Scale-Self-Report (MAP-SR)-that assesses the motivation and pleasure domain of negative symptoms. Thirty-seven participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder completed the 18-item MAP-SR, the CAINS, and other measures of functional outcome.

Looking at the other side of the coin: a meta-analysis of self-reported emotional arousal in people with schizophrenia.

Abnormalities in emotional experience have long been viewed as core features of schizophrenia. Numerous studies indicate that people with schizophrenia report less pleasure than controls when reporting non-current feelings using trait, hypothetical, prospective, and retrospective emotional self-report formats; however, current research has demonstrated that schizophrenia patients and controls do not differ in their subjective reactions to emotional stimuli in most laboratory studies. Although substantial attention has been paid to studies examining self-reported valence in schizophrenia, subjective reports of arousal in response to affective stimuli have been neglected.

Social anhedonia and affiliation: examining behavior and subjective reactions within a social interaction.

Social anhedonia is a promising indicator for the vulnerability towards developing schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and is an important determinant of the social impairment associated with these disorders. It is unknown if social anhedonia is associated with true deficits in experiential reactions or if lower social functioning in social anhedonia reflects behavioral deficits in social skill or initiation of social contact. Using a novel social interaction task, the current study compared controls (n=60) to individuals elevated on social anhedonia (n=49) on observer-rated social skill and facial affect and participant self-reports of their experiential reactions to an affiliative interaction.

Screening for negative symptoms: preliminary results from the self-report version of the Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms.

Though negative symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with a host of deleterious outcomes (e.g., White et al.

Attentional disengagement from emotional stimuli in schizophrenia.

Previous research indicates that abnormal attention-emotion interactions are related to symptom presentation in individuals with schizophrenia. However, the individual components of attention responsible for this dysfunction are unclear. In the current study we examined the possibility that schizophrenia patients with higher levels of negative symptoms (HI-NEG: n=14) have greater difficulty disengaging attention from unpleasant stimuli than patients with low negative symptoms (LOW-NEG: n=18) or controls (CN: n=27).

Is social anhedonia related to emotional responsivity and expressivity? A laboratory study in women.

Social anhedonia is an important feature of schizophrenia and it is a promising indicator of schizotypy. Although social anhedonia is defined as an affective construct (less pleasure derived from social encounters), little is known about the emotional responsivity and expressivity of individuals with high levels of social anhedonia. After screening a large sample of female undergraduate students (N = 1 085), a cohort of psychometrically identified individuals with high levels of social anhedonia (n = 34) and normally hedonic controls (n = 45) participated in laboratory assessments involving trait affectivity, self-reported dispositional emotional expressiveness, and the expression and experience of emotion in response to neutral, non-affiliative (i.