Faces, Virtual Spaces, and Social Functioning: Early Markers of Impairment in Psychosis Risk Syndrome
Tisha Chatterjea, Lauren Utter, MGB, Sajel Shah, MGH, Megan Good, BIDMC, Nicole Detore, MGH, Daphne Holt, MGH, Jacqueline Clauss, MGH
Background: Individuals who meet criteria for clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) have 20-fold increased risk for psychotic disorders. CHR-P is also associated with negative symptoms of psychosis, including social anhedonia and withdrawal. Understanding the underlying abnormalities contributing to social impairment in CHR-P may provide novel opportunities for treatment and intervention.
Methods: Participants ages 14-30 (CHR-P, psychosis-spectrum illness, and controls) were recruited via clinical services and online advertisements. They completed a battery of self-report clinical measures, an online behavioral task to assess emotion recognition accuracy, an open-ended interview task to quantify facial affect and linguistic complexity, a virtual-reality based personal space task, and clinician-rated interviews social and role function. As a preliminary analysis, Pearson correlations between self-report of social functioning, emotion recognition accuracy, and personal space measures were calculated. Accuracy of emotion recognition was calculated using the Penn ER40 (emotion recognition 40).
Results: Data collection is ongoing, with 12 participants enrolled to date (4 CHR, 4 POPS, 4 help-seeking). Preliminary analysis showed that across all three groups, individuals who self-reported more loneliness were less accurate in discriminating between different emotions and ages of faces (p < 0.05). More self-reported childhood trauma was related to less accuracy in identifying neutral faces (p=0.003).
Conclusion: This study leverages modern, cutting-edge methodologies to characterize social dysfunction in CHR-P. By coupling traditional self-report and clinician-rated measures with innovative technology to quantify behavior, we aim to illuminate mechanisms driving persistent social impairment in psychosis risk syndromes.