Context influences social cognitive judgments in paranoid individuals with schizophrenia

摘要

We previously presented a study investigating neural activation during judgments of trustworthiness in non-paranoid individuals with schizophrenia (NP-SCZ), paranoid individuals with schizophrenia (P-SCZ), and healthy individuals (CON) (Pinkham et al., 2008). During functional neuroimaging, participants viewed photos of faces and made dichotomous decisions of trustworthiness (i.e. trustworthy or untrustworthy) for each image. Analysis of these behavioral responses, provided in the original publication, demonstrated that P-SCZ, as compared to the other groups, rated significantly more faces as untrustworthy. However, individuals were also asked to make trustworthiness judgments about the same stimuli immediately following the MRI session. These additional ratings utilized the Likert-scale from -3 (not at all trustworthy) to +3 (very trustworthy) implemented in the original Trustworthiness/Approachability Task developed by Adolphs et al. (1998). Our goal was to obtain ratings that would allow for a parametric examination of neural responses that increased or decreased according to varying levels of trustworthiness. While not our primary motivation, these ratings also permit examination of the potential role of testing context on behavioral responding by comparing ratings provided in the scanner to those provided out of the scanner.