Several forms of social defeat, including ostracism, discrimination, bullying, and related experiences, have been associated with psychotic disorders and experiences. The social defeat hypothesis of schizophrenia attempts to explain these associations by positing that chronic exclusion due to having outsider status leads to deleterious neurobiological changes that produce psychosis. Here, we test non-neurobiological tenants of this theory, including the relative impact of daily, real-world, chronic social defeat versus an acute, time-limited, experimentally-induced socially defeating experience (i.e., social exclusion), the moderating role of psychosis-proneness, and the specificity of social defeat on psychosis-related outcomes. We find that real-world, chronic, but not acute, time-limited, laboratory-based social defeat is associated with decreased trust, but not false-alarms on an auditory signal detection task. These associations were qualified by interactions that are in line with social reconnection (i.e., positive appraisals of social stimuli following exclusion). Real-world, chronic social defeat was also associated with delusion- and hallucination-proneness. Together, these data highlight the importance of daily, real-world forms of social defeat versus laboratory manipulations on specific psychosis-related outcomes.
Does reading fiction improve our ability to understand one another? Correlational data suggest that lifetime fiction exposure is positively associated with social outcomes. The latest experimental data suggest that fiction reading may slightly improve social ability, although this conclusion is tenuous. Here, we test fiction’s putative causal impact on social outcomes by conducting a randomized controlled study in which adult participants (N=210) were randomly assigned to engage in no reading for pleasure, or to read fiction or nonfiction for 45 min/day, five days/week, for four weeks. At the end of the study, participants were assessed on three classes of social outcomes: theory of mind (ToM), empathy, and social functioning. Contrary to other experimental work, fiction readers did not outperform nonfiction readers or participants who abstained from pleasure reading on any social outcome. Nonfiction readers outperformed those who abstained from pleasure reading on empathy measures. For fiction readers, narrative transportation was positively associated with empathy post-reading, and intrinsic motivation was positively associated with empathy and ToM post-reading. Contrary to other correlational work, we did not observe associations between lifetime fiction exposure and social outcomes. These data are consistent with the following possibilities regarding fiction’s positive impact on social outcomes: such findings may reflect a priming effect, may occur only after prolonged exposure to fiction, and/or may occur for readers who exhibit a particular kind of engagement with the reading.
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