Impairment in flexible emotion-based learning in hallucination- and delusion-prone individuals

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Cella, Matteo; Dymond, Simon and Cooper, Andrew. 2009. Impairment in flexible emotion-based learning in hallucination- and delusion-prone individuals. Psychiatry Research, 170(1), pp. 70-74. ISSN 01651781 [Article]

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2008.07.001

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Deficits in emotion-based learning are implicated in many psychiatric disorders. Research conducted with patients with schizophrenia using one of the most popular tasks for the investigation of emotion-based learning, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), has largely been inconclusive. The present study employed a novel, contingency-shifting variant IGT with hallucination- and delusion-prone university students to determine whether previous findings were due merely to the presence of psychosis. Following initial screening of a sample of 253 students (mean age = 20.13 years, S.D. = 3.27), 28 high (10 male, 18 female) and 27 low (12 male, 15 female) hallucination-prone and 27 high (7 male, 20 female) and 26 low (11 male, 15 female) delusion-prone individuals completed the contingency-shifting variant IGT. Results showed no significant differences between the performances of high and low hallucination- and delusion-prone individuals during the original phase of the task. Differences only emerged following the onset of the contingency-shift phases, with individuals high in hallucination- and delusion-proneness having impaired performance compared with low hallucination- and delusion-prone individuals. Overall, the present findings demonstrate that impairments associated with hallucination- and delusion-proneness are specific to the shift phase of the contingency-shifting variant IGT, which supports previous findings with patients with schizophrenia.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2008.07.001