Motivation and Pleasure Deficits Undermine the Benefits of Social Affiliation in Psychosis
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In psychotic disorders, motivation and pleasure (MAP) deficits are associated with decreased affiliation and heightened functional impairment. We leveraged a transdiagnostic sample enriched for psychosis and a multi-method approach to test the hypothesis that MAP deficits undermine the stress-buffering benefits of affiliation. Participants completed the Social Affiliation Enhancement Task (SAET) to cultivate affiliation with an experimental partner. Although the SAET increased perceived affiliation and mood, individuals with greater negative symptoms derived smaller emotional benefits from the partners, as indexed by self-report and facial behavior. We then used the Handholding fMRI paradigm, which combines threat-anticipation with affiliative physical contact, to determine whether MAP deficits undermine the social regulation of distress. Individuals with greater MAP deficits showed diminished neural 'benefits'-reduced dampening of threat-elicited activation-from affiliative touch in key frontoparietal nodes of the Dorsal Attention Network. In short, MAP symptoms disrupt the emotional and neuroregulatory benefits of affiliation.
Source: Clinical Psychological Science
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Individual Differences in Social Affiliation, Understanding Social Affiliative Deficits in Psychopathology, Using Multimodal Neuroimaging and Real-World Experience Sampling to Understand Negative Affect and Paranoid Ideation in Psychosis, Improving Treatment Engagement in Individuals with Co-occurring Substance Use and Psychosis: A Telemedicine Family-Based Approach, Using Theory- and Data-Driven Neurocomputational Approaches and Digital Phenotyping to Understand RDoC Acute and Potential Threat, Using Computational Neuroimaging and Extended Smartphone Assessment to Understand the Pathways Linking Threat-Related Brain Circuits to Alcohol Misuse Across Adulthood
OpenAlex ID: W4391982269