Week 2.3.2: Interacting with Others Flashcards
Significantly impacts social life, making it a “profoundly social condition.”
Psychosis
Problems with understanding and processing social information.
Examples: Paranoia (extreme distrust of others) and social withdrawal (avoiding social interactions).
Social Cognitive Deficits
How does the onset of psychosis affect social functioning?
Pre-Illness Drop: Many patients showed a decline in social functioning before the onset of psychotic illness.
Post-Illness Stability: After the onset of illness, social functioning remained stable but varied in severity.
Refers to the mental processes involved in understanding and interacting with others.
Impairment Prevalence: Up to 75% of patients with schizophrenia experience social cognitive impairments.
Social Cognition
This is the tendency to attribute causes of events to personal factors rather than situational ones.
Attribution Bias
A genetic or biological marker that is associated with a disease but is also present in unaffected relatives.
Endophenotype
The ability to understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Theory of Mind
Patients with positive symptoms (e.g., hallucinations, delusions) may over-interpret social cues, leading to incorrect assumptions about others’ intentions.
Example: A psychotic patient sees two colleagues laughing and might think:
Incorrect Assumption: “They are plotting against me.”
Excessive Interpretation: “They must be planning to get me fired because they don’t like me.”
Over-Mentalizing
Can psychosis patients recognize emotions of others?
Patients are generally better at recognizing positive emotions like happiness compared to negative emotions (i.e., sadness, anger)
The ability to decode non-verbal social cues (e.g., body language, facial expressions).
Social Perception and Knowledge
Individuals with persecutory delusions tend to attribute negative outcomes to others rather than to situations.
Personalizing Bias
Basic cognitive functions like memory, attention, and executive function.
Neurocognitive Domains
Functions related to understanding and interacting with others, like theory of mind and emotion recognition.
Social Cognitive Domains
Difficulty accurately perceiving emotions in others.
Impaired Emotion Perception
Difficulty interpreting social cues correctly.
Impaired Social Perception
Misinterpreting a coworker’s expression as anger directed personally at oneself.
Negative Attribution
This misinterpretation can lead to social withdrawal or paranoid behavior, further causing social dysfunction.
Social Withdrawal or Paranoia
The ability to accurately identify and understand others’ emotions.
Emotion Perception
The ability to interpret social cues, such as body language and facial expressions.
Social Perception
The tendency to attribute causes of events to personal or situational factors.
Attribution Style
How genetic factors and environmental influences interact.
Gene-Environment Interactions
How does prolonged stress affect brain function?
Long-term exposure to stress might lead to abnormal brain development or changes in brain connectivity, which then affect brain function.
How is schizophrenia classified as a social disorder?
Schizophrenia involves impairments in social cognition (understanding and interacting with others), social functioning (maintaining relationships and daily activities), and social symptoms (e.g., paranoia, social withdrawal).
Schizophrenia is associated with widespread patterns of reduced brain activation during social cognitive tasks compared to healthy controls.
