Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use.

Women are widely assumed to be more talkative than men. Challenging this assumption, Mehl et al. (2007) provided empirical evidence that men and women do not differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day (WPD) each.

Optimizing recovery in first-episode psychosis: A systematic review of psychosocial interventions.

This systematic review evaluates the efficacy of psychosocial interventions for individuals experiencing first-episode psychosis (FEP) across multiple recovery outcomes. Drawing from 35 studies, the analysis synthesizes evidence on symptom reduction, social and role functioning improvement, continuity of care, hospitalization rates, and other psychological outcomes. Regarding symptom reduction, specialized FEP programs demonstrated decreases across positive, negative, and general symptoms.

Social anhedonia in the daily lives of people with schizophrenia: Examination of anticipated and consummatory pleasure.

Social anhedonia is a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia. Discrepancies in anticipated versus consummatory pleasure for non-social stimuli are well-documented. Thus, a similar emotional paradox may underlie social anhedonia.

Social Activity in Schizotypy: Measuring Frequency and Enjoyment of Social Events.

Improving social functioning deficits-a core characteristic of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders-is often listed by patients as a key recovery goal. Evidence suggests that social deficits also extend to people with schizotypy, a group at heightened risk for psychotic and other psychopathological disorders. One challenge of social functioning research in schizotypy is understanding whether social deficits arise from receiving less pleasure from social activities or from participating less in high-pleasure activities.

Differential Risk: Gender and Racial Differences in the Relationship between Trauma, Discrimination, and Schizotypy.

Traumatic experiences are associated with increased experiences of positive schizotypy. This may be especially important for People of Color, who experience higher rates of trauma and racial discrimination. No study to date has examined how racial disparities in traumatic experiences may impact schizotypy.

Narrative Forewarnings: A Qualitative Analysis of the Themes Preceding Disorganized Speech in Schizophrenia.

Disorganized speech is a critical barrier to recovery in schizophrenia, with profound negative impacts on one's ability to engage with the world. Despite the limited efficacy of existing treatments in addressing disorganization, a qualitative analysis of what leads to disorganization in patient narratives has been lacking. This study addresses this gap through inductive thematic analysis of 30 narrative interviews with individuals with schizophrenia, matched based on whether Formal Thought Disorder (FTD) is present.

Meta-analysis of the relationship between metacognition and disorganized symptoms in psychosis.

Objective: Disorganized symptoms show associations with metacognitive deficits in psychosis. However, the magnitude of this relationship is unclear. This meta-analysis aimed to 1) quantify relationships between metacognition and both disorganized symptoms and disorganized speech; and 2) examine moderators of these relationships (e.

Diversity, equity, and inclusivity in observational ambulatory assessment: Recommendations from two decades of Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) research.

Ambient audio sampling methods such as the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) have become increasingly prominent in clinical and social sciences research. These methods record snippets of naturalistically assessed audio from participants' daily lives, enabling novel observational research about the daily social interactions, identities, environments, behaviors, and speech of populations of interest. In practice, these scientific opportunities are equaled by methodological challenges: researchers' own cultural backgrounds and identities can easily and unknowingly permeate the collection, coding, analysis, and interpretation of social data from daily life.

Social pleasure in daily life: A meta-analysis of experience sampling studies in schizophrenia.

Social anhedonia is considered a key feature of schizophrenia that leads to impaired social functioning. Although traditional laboratory measures assess non-current social pleasure, researchers have begun using experience sampling methods (ESM) to measure current, or consummatory, experiences of social pleasure in daily life. A recent meta-analysis examined deficits in consummatory social pleasure in schizophrenia and found vast heterogeneity in effect sizes across ESM studies.

Metacognitive Beliefs and Metacognitive Capacity: Do They Assess Related Phenomena?

Metacognition has been defined several ways across different fields. In schizophrenia, two primary approaches to assessing metacognition focus on measuring metacognitive beliefs and metacognitive capacity. The degree of association between these two approaches is unclear.

Do People With Schizophrenia Enjoy Social Activities as Much as Everyone Else? A Meta-analysis of Consummatory Social Pleasure.

Background: The "emotion paradox" of schizophrenia suggests people with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits when reporting anticipated and retrospective pleasure; yet, in-the-moment, consummatory pleasure is largely intact. It is uncertain how these findings extend to social situations. This meta-analysis aimed to (1) determine the mean difference in consummatory social pleasure between people with schizophrenia and healthy controls, and (2) examine moderators of this effect, including study design and clinical characteristics of participants.

Automated measures of speech content and speech organization in schizophrenia: Test-retest reliability and generalizability across demographic variables.

Technological advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have increased efficiency of assessing speech content and speech organization in schizophrenia. Despite these developments, there has been little focus on the psychometrics of these approaches. Using two common assessments, the current study addressed this gap by: 1) measuring test-retest reliability; and 2) assessing whether speech content and/or speech organization generalize across demographics.

Mild vs. moderate: How behavioral speech measures predict metacognitive capacity across different levels of formal thought disorder.

Disorganized speech is a key component of formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia. Recent work has tied disorganized speech to deficits in metacognition, or one's ability to integrate experiences to form complex mental representations. The level of FTD at which differences in metacognitive capacity emerge remains unclear.

Emergence of Language Related to Self-experience and Agency in Autobiographical Narratives of Individuals With Schizophrenia.

Background And Hypothesis: Disturbances in self-experience are a central feature of schizophrenia and its study can enhance phenomenological understanding and inform mechanisms underlying clinical symptoms. Self-experience involves the sense of self-presence, of being the subject of one's own experiences and agent of one's own actions, and of being distinct from others. Self-experience is traditionally assessed by manual rating of interviews; however, natural language processing (NLP) offers automated approach that can augment manual ratings by rapid and reliable analysis of text.

Meaning-making processes across the lifespan: An investigation of the developmental course of metacognitive capacity.

Deficits in metacognitive capacity (i.e., the ability to integrate knowledge of oneself and others into a cohesive whole) have been shown to lead to poor functional outcome in psychosis.

Stuck Inside: How Social Functioning in Schizophrenia Changed During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Social distancing policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic altered our social interactions. People with schizophrenia, who already exhibit social deficits, may have been disproportionally impacted. In this pilot study, we a) compared prepandemic social functioning to functioning during the pandemic in people with schizophrenia ( n = 21) who had data at both time points; and b) examined if patterns of decline in schizophrenia differed from healthy controls ( n = 21) across a series of repeated-measures analyses of variance.

Semantic and phonetic similarity of verbal fluency responses in early-stage psychosis.

Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based tasks such as the verbal fluency test could efficiently characterize the nature and functional correlates of these disturbances. Participants with early-stage psychosis (n=20) and demographically matched controls without a psychiatric diagnosis (n=20) performed category and letter verbal fluency.

Personalizing interventions using real-world interactions: Improving symptoms and social functioning in schizophrenia with tailored metacognitive therapy.

Objective: When clients' lives are not reflected in therapy, they struggle to apply the skills learned in treatment to everyday situations. In this pilot study, we determined if using clients' real-world interactions in therapy could effectively target metacognitive capacity-yielding improved symptoms and social functioning-by tailoring treatment to focus on issues faced by clients in daily life.

Method: Using a randomized controlled trial design, schizophrenia subjects with metacognitive deficits completed 24 sessions of: (a) Standard Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT); or (b) Tailored MERIT.

Quality versus quantity: Determining real-world social functioning deficits in schizophrenia.

Social dysfunction is a hallmark of schizophrenia that is associated with emotional disturbances. Researchers have employed ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to measure social and emotional functioning in people with schizophrenia. Yet, few studies have evaluated quality of real-world social interactions, and it is unclear how interactions impact emotional experiences in this population.

Social functioning in schizophrenia: Comparing laboratory-based assessment with real-world measures.

Researchers have measured social functioning in schizophrenia using many different strategies. Recent technological advances have made it possible to passively measure behaviors in real-world social situations-allowing for more objective, ecologically valid assessments. Yet, research testing the convergent validity among real-world and laboratory-based social functioning assessment is sparse.

Comparing symptoms and emotion recognition in African American and White samples with schizophrenia.

Racial status has an important role in schizophrenia, with African American samples being rated lower than White participants on a range of constructs. In many studies, however, demographic factors are not accounted for. In the present study, African American (n = 106) and White participants (n = 81) were compared on symptom severity and emotion recognition scales while controlling for other demographic factors.

A cognitive model of diminished expression in schizophrenia: The interface of metacognition, cognitive symptoms and language disturbances.

The resistance of negative symptoms to pharmacologic treatment has spurred interest in understanding the psychological factors that contribute to their formation and persistence. However, little is understood about the psychological processes that reinforce and sustain the negative symptoms domain of diminished expression. Prior research has shown that higher levels of diminished expression relate to deficits in metacognitive capacity.

Mobile enhancement of motivation in schizophrenia: A pilot randomized controlled trial of a personalized text message intervention for motivation deficits.

Objective: Motivation deficits remain an unmet treatment need in schizophrenia. Recent research has identified mechanisms underlying motivation deficits (i.e.

The insight paradox in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis of the relationship between clinical insight and quality of life.

Poor clinical insight affects people with schizophrenia and has been cited as a chief cause of poor outcomes. As such, clinical insight is often a target of intervention; however, increases in insight have shown associations with decreased quality of life in a phenomenon known as the "insight paradox." Understanding the relationship between insight and quality of life is important as clients often feel hopeless when quality of life decreases.