Restricted attention to social cues in schizophrenia patients

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• 作者：Alexandra Nikolaides ; Susanne Miess…
• 关键词：Psychosis ; Schizophrenia ; Gaze behavior ; Visual scanpath ; Eye tracking ; Social perception ; Social cognition ; Functioning
• 刊名：European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：October 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：266
• 期：7
• 页码：649-661
• 全文大小：795 KB
• 刊物类别：Medicine
• 刊物主题：Medicine & Public Health
  Psychiatry
  Neurosciences
  Neurology
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1433-8491
• 卷排序：266

文摘

Deficits of psychosocial functioning are a robust finding in schizophrenia. Research on social cognition may open a new avenue for the development of effective interventions. As a correlate of social perceptive information processing deficits, schizophrenia patients (SZP) show deviant gaze behavior (GB) while viewing emotional faces. As understanding of a social environment requires gathering complex social information, our study aimed at investigating the gaze behavior of SZP related to social interactions and its impact on the level of social and role functioning. GB of 32 SZP and 37 healthy control individuals (HCI) was investigated with a high-resolution eye tracker during an unguided viewing of 12 complex pictures of social interaction scenes. Regarding whole pictures, SZP showed a shorter scanpath length, fewer fixations and a shorter mean distance between fixations. Furthermore, SZP exhibited fewer and shorter fixations on faces, but not on the socially informative bodies nor on the background, suggesting a cue-specific abnormality. Logistic regression with bootstrapping yielded a model including two GB parameters; a subsequent ROC curve analysis indicated an excellent ability of group discrimination (AUC .85). Face-related GB aberrations correlated with lower social and role functioning and with delusional thinking, but not with negative symptoms. Training of spontaneous integration of face-related social information seems promising to enable a holistic perception of social information, which may in turn improve social and role functioning. The observed ability to discriminate SZP from HCI warrants further research on the predictive validity of GB in psychosis risk prediction.