Aberrant reward processing to positive versus negative outcomes across psychotic disorders

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. Thus, it remains unclear whether SZ are similarly impaired in social and monetary RL, or whether social-specific factors may further inhibit their ability to learn from social feedback. Thirty-one individuals with SZ and 31 healthy controls (HCs) participated in a RL paradigm to test hypotheses about social versus monetary RL. SZ exhibited impaired RL compared to HCs in both social and monetary tasks. Further, a Group × Task interaction demonstrated that SZ was more impaired when learning from social than monetary reinforcement, F(1, 59) = 5.99, p = .017. This differential deficit to social RL was not accounted for by reported pleasure from social feedback, which did not differ between groups. Instead, SZ had poorer emotion recognition than HCs, t(1, 60) = 4.80, p < .001, particularly for negative emotions, and controlling for this eliminated the differential social RL impairment. These results suggest the possibility that difficulty recognizing social cues, especially those indicating negative feedback, may relate to a reduced ability to learn from others' feedback. Thus, future research could elucidate whether targeting these emotion recognition difficulties in treatment could serve as a potential mechanism for improving social functioning in SZ. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social Motivation in Schizophrenia: What's Effort Got to Do With It?

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS

Social motivation, defined as the fundamental human desire to seek out, engage in, and maintain interpersonal bonds, has become a growing area of research in schizophrenia. The major focus has been on understanding the impact of social reward-related processes. An obvious but rarely acknowledged fact is that social interactions, much like other goal-directed acts, require the exertion of effort. In this Review Article, we argue that social motivation in schizophrenia can be conceptualized through the lens of an established framework: effort-based decision-making (EBDM).

STUDY DESIGN

We conducted a literature review on social reward processing in schizophrenia, then extended these findings by applying concepts and insights from the literature on EBDM to the study of social motivation.

STUDY RESULTS

Within the EBDM framework, decisions about whether or not to pursue social interactions are bound by cost/benefit calculations. That is, people do not pursue social behaviors when the estimated "cost" of the required effort outweighs the anticipated "benefit" or reward. We propose that people with schizophrenia are less likely to engage in social interaction compared with healthy samples because they: (1) underestimate the benefits of relationships (based on expectations of reward/punishment), (2) overestimate the effort costs associated with social interaction, and/or (3) fail to integrate cost-benefit information in an optimal manner.

CONCLUSIONS

EBDM is an especially promising framework of social motivation that goes beyond the current focus on social reward processing to include a focus on effort.