Publications by authors named "Okruszek L"

Despite theoretical emphasis on loneliness affecting social information processing, empirical studies lack consensus. We previously adopted a clinical science framework to measure the association between social cognitive capacity and bias and both objective and perceived social isolation in nonclinical participants. Our prior study found that while objective social isolation is linked to both social cognitive capacity and social cognitive bias, loneliness is associated only with the latter.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While loneliness may motivate individuals to approach others, it may simultaneously increase their focus on self-preservation, resulting in egocentric behavior. Since the evidence linking loneliness and prosociality is inconclusive, the current meta-analysis aims to explore this relationship. Through a systematic search of databases, we identified 35 studies involving 44,764 participants.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chronic loneliness and low perceived social support have been recognized as risk factors for both mental and cardiovascular disorders. It has been proposed that their link to psychophysiological problems may involve changes in parasympathetic activity. However, the exact underlying psychopathological mechanisms and the moderating effects of gender are still not thoroughly examined.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Theoretical accounts of loneliness suggest that it may lead to psychopathological consequences by increasing the perception of social threat. However, it is unclear whether the real-life effects of both trait and state loneliness are specific to social situations. To answer this question, two experience sampling studies were conducted with prestratified samples of young adults (18-35) with moderate (Study 1, N = 64) or low and high (Study 2, N = 103) levels of loneliness.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

It has been hypothesized that lonely individuals demonstrate hypervigilance toward social threats. However, recent studies have raised doubts about the reliability of tasks commonly used to measure attentional biases toward threats. Two alternative approaches have been suggested to overcome the limitations of traditional analysis of attentional bias.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous studies show that social cues are processed preferentially by the human visual system and that perception of communicative intentions, particularly those self-directed, attracts and biases attention. However, it is still unclear when in the temporal hierarchy of visual processing communicative cues exert impact on perception and whether their effects are automatic or volitional. Therefore, in the present study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the pattern of neural activity associated with processing communicative and individual gestures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While considerable emphasis has been put on investigating the mechanisms that drive reduced social connection in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ), recent studies have increasingly focused on the issue of loneliness in SCZ. As both social cognitive bias and self-reported empathy predict loneliness in non-clinical populations, the current study aims to examine the relationship between loneliness, reduced social connection and social cognitive biases, and self-reported empathy in SCZ. Ninety-three adult SCZ and sixty-six matched healthy individuals completed a battery of questionnaires measuring loneliness and social connection (Revised-UCLA Loneliness Scale, Lubben-Social Network Scale, Social Disconnectedness Scale), cognitive biases (Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire, Davos Assessment of Cognitive Biases Scale, Cognitive Biases Questionnaire for psychosis) and self-reported empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Loneliness is a concern for patients with schizophrenia. However, the correlates of loneliness in patients with schizophrenia are unclear; thus, the aim of the study is to investigate neuro- and social cognitive mechanisms associated with loneliness in individuals with schizophrenia.

Method: Data from clinical, neurocognitive, and social cognitive assessments were pooled from two cross-national samples (Poland/USA) to examine potential predictors of loneliness in 147 patients with schizophrenia and 103 healthy controls overall.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mentalizing is the key socio-cognitive ability. Its heterogeneous structure may result from a variety of forms of mental state inference, which may be based on lower-level processing of cues encoded in the observable behavior of others, or rather involve higher-level computations aimed at understanding another person's perspective. Here we aimed to investigate the representational content of the brain regions engaged in mentalizing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While the psychological predictors of antiscience beliefs have been extensively studied, neural underpinnings of the antiscience beliefs have received relatively little interest. The aim of the current study is to investigate whether attitudes towards the scientific issues are reflected in the N400 potential. Thirty-one individuals were asked to judge whether six different issues presented as primes (vaccines, medicines, nuclear energy, solar energy, genetically-modified organisms (GMO), natural farming) are well-described by ten positive and ten negative target words.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Social cognitive deficits are currently considered as one of the main predictors of clinical symptoms and functional outcome in patients with schizophrenia. Multiple studies have suggested that a two-factor solution (low-level vs. high-level) best describes the structure of social cognitive processes in patients.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous lines of research suggest that communicative dyadic actions elicit preferential processing and more accurate detection compared to similar but individual actions. However, it is unclear whether the presence of the second agent provides additional cues that allow for more accurate discriminability between communicative and individual intentions or whether it lowers the threshold for perceiving third-party encounters as interactive. We performed a series of studies comparing the recognition of communicative actions from single and dyadic displays in healthy individuals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A significant body of research supports the relationship between religious attendance, objective and subjective social networks characteristics, and mental well-being. This trajectory may be particularly important in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Thus, the current study examined the relationship between religious attendance, social network characteristics, loneliness, and mental well-being in a sample of 564 young adults (aged 18-35 years) soon after the first COVID-19-related restrictions were imposed in Poland.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Computational linguistics has developed tools to objectively evaluate schizophrenia symptoms, particularly focusing on speech coherence related to formal thought disorder (FTD).
  • A study was conducted comparing neural network-based utterance embeddings (ELMo approach) against traditional coherence models to detect FTD in interviews with schizophrenia patients and healthy controls.
  • The ELMo model achieved 80% accuracy in distinguishing between the two groups, outperforming the coherence model (70% accuracy) and a clinician's assessment (74% accuracy), showing that neural language models can enhance the detection of disordered language alongside human evaluations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Perceived social isolation, or loneliness, has been repeatedly linked to numerous adverse health outcomes. Much effort has been directed towards elucidating the mechanisms underlying its effects on the cardiovascular system, which may explain the deleterious effects on morbidity and mortality. It has been previously suggested that perceived social isolation can impair effective parasympathetic regulation and physiological adjustment to the demands of the social environment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: The main goal of the study was an adaptation and validation of the Hinting Task to Polish language. The Hinting Task is the main instrument used to assess theory of mind deficits in individuals with schizophrenia.

Methods: Two groups were compared in the course of the study: individuals with schizophrenia and people without a history of mental and neurological disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments worldwide to implement unprecedented response strategies. While crucial to limiting the spread of the virus, "social distancing" may lead to severe psychological consequences, especially in lonely individuals.

Methods: We used cross-sectional ( = 380) and longitudinal ( = 74) designs to investigate the links between loneliness, anxiety, and depression symptoms (ADS) and COVID-19 risk perception and affective response in young adults who implemented social distancing during the first 2 weeks of the state of epidemic threat in Poland.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Both cognitive appraisals of risks associated with the specific disease and affective response to crisis situations have been shown to shape an individual response to pandemics. COVID-19 pandemic and measures introduced to contain it present an unparalleled challenge to mental well-being worldwide. Here, we examine the relationship between self-reported cognitive biases (CB) and emotion regulation skills (ER), COVID-19 risk perception and affective response, and mental well-being (MWB).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The ability to detect and interpret social interactions (SI) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world. Multiple lines of evidence converge to indicate the preferential processing of SI when compared to the individual actions of multiple agents, even if the actions were visually degraded to minimalistic point-light displays (PLDs). Here, we present a novel PLD dataset (Social Perception and Interaction Database; SoPID) that may be used for studying multiple levels of social information processing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous studies have shown dysfunctional mechanism of interaction between bottom-up emotional and top-down cognitive processes in persons with schizophrenia (SCZ). During the emotional directed forgetting (DF) paradigm participants have to apply volitional mechanisms to resist automatic emotional enhancement of the memory. Here we sought to compare mechanisms underlying emotional DF in SCZ and in healthy persons (HC).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aims: Psychotic symptoms fluctuate over time and effective and regular monitoring may contribute to relapse prevention and improve long-term outcomes. In this proof-of-concept study we test the feasibility, acceptability and potential usefulness of a novel digital method assessing the association between physiological signals and psychotic symptom distress.

Methods: Fifteen participants with first episode psychosis were asked to use a self-assessment mobile phone application for psychotic symptom monitoring for 10 days while using a wrist worn device continuously recording heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Research on individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ) shows a variety of emotional and cognitive deficits. We examined the hypothesis that ineffective emotional interference control may impact working memory (WM) performance by disrupting information encoding, maintenance, or retrieval in SCZ. Twenty-eight SCZ and 28 matched healthy controls (HC) performed the visual and verbal delayed-matching-to-sample task (DMST) with trials preceded by negative and nonemotional visual distractors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Dysfunction in the understanding of social signals has been reported in persons with epilepsy, which may partially explain lower levels of life satisfaction in this patient population. Extensive assessment is necessary, particularly when the mesial temporal lobe, responsible for emotion processing, is affected. The authors examined multiple levels of social perception in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE), including judgments of point-light motion displays of human communicative interactions (Communicative Interactions Database-5 Alternative Forced Choice format) and theory-of-mind processes evaluated using geometric shapes (Frith-Happé animations [FHA]).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Social neuroscience offers a wide range of techniques that may be applied to study the social cognitive deficits that may underlie reduced social functioning-a common feature across many psychiatric disorders. At the same time, a significant proportion of research in this area has been conducted using paradigms that utilize static displays of faces or eyes. The use of point-light displays (PLDs) offers a viable alternative for studying recognition of emotion or intention inference while minimizing the amount of information presented to participants.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Social predictive coding is now a well-established phenomenon in healthy individuals. It has been demonstrated that the communicative gestures of one agent may be effectively used to predict the actions of other agents. Individuals with schizophrenia often present social-cognitive deficits.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF