Rejection sensitivity and its relationship to schizotypy and aggression: current status and future directions

The Shared and Distinct Mechanisms Underlying Fear of Evaluation in Social Anxiety: The Roles of Negative and Positive Evaluation

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with persistent fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and fear of positive evaluation (FPE), which play critical roles in the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms. However, it remains unclear how FNE and FPE contribute to the common and different symptoms of social anxiety. In this review, we tried to elucidate the shared and distinct mechanisms underlying fear of evaluation and clarify the impact of FNE and FPE on social anxiety by integrating the theories, external expressions, and internal mechanisms. First, FNE and FPE share evolutionary functions but have distinct motivations for maintaining social role stability. Second, FNE and FPE share similar emotions and avoidance behaviors but contribute to distinct comorbid symptoms in SAD, including eating disorders and alcohol abuse. Third, FNE and FPE share emotional and social pain circuits but have different dysfunctions in the prefrontal, cingulate, and reward brain regions, which are associated with rejection sensitivity and anhedonia features. Overall, this review sheds light on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of SAD based on fear of evaluation, highlighting both the shared and distinctive aspects of FNE and FPE. These insights have important implications for the development of effective interventions for social anxiety.

How to elicit a negative bias? Manipulating contrast and saturation with the facial emotion salience task

Introduction

Emotion recognition impairments and a tendency to misclassify neutral faces as negative are common in schizophrenia. A possible explanation for these deficits is aberrant salience attribution. To explore the possibility of salience driven emotion recognition deficits, we implemented a novel facial emotion salience task (FEST).

Methods

Sixty-six healthy participants with variations in psychometric schizotypy completed the FEST. In the FEST, we manipulated physical salience (FEST-1: contrast, FEST-2: saturation) of emotionally salient (positive, i.e., happy and negative, i.e., fearful) and non-salient (neutral) facial expressions.

Results

When salience was high (increased contrast), participants recognized negative facial expressions faster, whereas neutral faces were recognized more slowly and were more frequently misclassified as negative. When salience was low (decreased saturation), positive expressions were recognized more slowly. These measures were not associated with schizotypy in our sample.

Discussion

Our findings show that the match between physical and emotional salience influences emotion recognition and suggest that the FEST is suitable to simulate aberrant salience processing during emotion recognition in healthy participants.

Tensor factorization approach for ERP-based assessment of schizotypy in a novel auditory oddball task on perceived family stress

Objective. Schizotypy, a potential phenotype for schizophrenia, is a personality trait that depicts psychosis-like signs in the normal range of psychosis continuum. Family communication may affect the social functioning of people with schizotypy. Greater family stress, such as irritability, criticism and less praise, is perceived at a higher level of schizotypy. This study aims to determine the differences between people with high and low levels of schizotypy using electroencephalography (EEG) during criticism, praise and neutral comments. EEGs were recorded from 29 participants in the general community who varied from low schizotypy to high schizotypy (HS) during a novel emotional auditory oddball task.Approach. We consider the difference in event-related potential parameters, namely the amplitude and latency of P300 subcomponents (P3a and P3b), between pairs of target words (standard, positive, negative and neutral). A model based on tensor factorization is then proposed to detect these components from the EEG using the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC decomposition technique. Finally, we employ the mutual information estimation method to select influential features for classification.Main results.The highest classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 93.1%, 94.73%, and 90% are obtained via leave-one-out cross validation.Significance. This is the first attempt to investigate the identification of individuals with psychometrically-defined HS from brain responses that are specifically associated with perceiving family stress and schizotypy. By measuring these brain responses to social stress, we achieve the goal of improving the accuracy in detection of early episodes of psychosis.

The Relationship Among Mentalization, Mindfulness, Working Memory, and Schizotypal Personality Traits in the General Population

Individuals with high schizotypal traits are less able to observe, describe, and monitor inner feelings, thoughts, and experiences, commonly referred to as mindfulness and mentalization. High schizotypy is also associated with impaired working memory (WM). However, the relationship among mindfulness, mentalization, WM, and schizotypal traits is unknown. Three hundred individuals from the community (mean age: 38.0 years, SD = 10.5; 49.3% women) completed questionnaires examining schizotypal traits, mindfulness, and mentalization and performed working memory tasks. Results revealed that mentalization was a general predictor of schizotypal traits, including unusual experiences, cognitive disorganization, introverted anhedonia, and impulsive nonconformity, when the effect of mindfulness and working memory was controlled. We also found a positive correlation between mindfulness and mentalization. Low mindfulness and mentalization performances were associated with high schizotypy. However, poor working memory was only weakly linked to cognitive disorganization and introverted anhedonia. These findings suggest that weak mentalization is a core feature of schizotypy independent of mindfulness and working memory.