Aberrant computational mechanisms of social learning and decision-making in schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder

Abstract

Psychiatric disorders are ubiquitously characterized by debilitating social impairments. These difficulties are thought to emerge from aberrant social inference. In order to elucidate the underlying computational mechanisms, patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (N = 29), schizophrenia (N = 31), and borderline personality disorder (N = 31) as well as healthy controls (N = 34) performed a probabilistic reward learning task in which participants could learn from social and non-social information. Patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder performed more poorly on the task than healthy controls and patients with major depressive disorder. Broken down by domain, borderline personality disorder patients performed better in the social compared to the non-social domain. In contrast, controls and major depressive disorder patients showed the opposite pattern and schizophrenia patients showed no difference between domains. In effect, borderline personality disorder patients gave up a possible overall performance advantage by concentrating their learning in the social at the expense of the non-social domain. We used computational modeling to assess learning and decision-making parameters estimated for each participant from their behavior. This enabled additional insights into the underlying learning and decision-making mechanisms. Patients with borderline personality disorder showed slower learning from social and non-social information and an exaggerated sensitivity to changes in environmental volatility, both in the non-social and the social domain, but more so in the latter. Regarding decision-making the modeling revealed that compared to controls and major depression patients, patients with borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia showed a stronger reliance on social relative to non-social information when making choices. Depressed patients did not differ significantly from controls in this respect. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion of a general interpersonal hypersensitivity in borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia based on a shared computational mechanism characterized by an over-reliance on beliefs about others in making decisions and by an exaggerated need to make sense of others during learning specifically in borderline personality disorder.

Impulsivity and Emotional Dysregulation Predict Choice Behavior During a Competitive Multiplayer Game in Adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorder

“…Emotion dysregulation may disrupt self-regulation and deliberative processes in BPD (Hallquist et al, 2018; Sharp et al, 2011), including mentalization (Henco et al, 2020; Sharp et al, 2011). We found that higher levels of emotion dysregulation in the BPD group, particularly, difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior (goals) and limited access to emotion regulation strategies (strategies), were associated with increased reward rate (Fig.…”

“…Neuroeconomic games that probe decision-making in ecologically valid (often interpersonal) contexts (Hasler, 2012; Jeung et al, 2016; King-Casas & Chiu, 2012; Kishida et al, 2010; Montague, 2007; Robson et al, 2020; Sharp, 2012; Sharp et al, 2012) have revealed deficits in cooperative and trust behaviors in BPD, specifically related to perception of social norms and risk as compared to non-social risk (e.g., decisions involving fixed gambles; Franzen et al, 2011; Henco et al, 2020; King-casas et al, 2008; Preuss et al, 2016; Seres et al, 2009; Sharp, 2012; Unoka et al, 2009). Similarly, tasks assessing so-called ‘theory of mind’ processes (also known as ‘mentalizing’) have shown that adolescents with BPD show a tendency to ‘hypermentalize’ when inferring the intentions or mental states of others (Arntz et al, 2009; Henco et al, 2020; Sharp et al, 2011; Vaskinn et al, 2015; Zabihzadeh et al, 2017). Although these studies suggest changes in mentalization and cooperative decision-making processes in BPD, behavior during competitive interactions has not been investigated.…”

“…Exaggerated vigilance to social information that may result in enhanced prediction of the opponent’s behavior (and therefore improved task performance) and/or 2. Misattribution of opponent’s intentions/actions and/or overinterpretation of one’s own emotional responses (Henco et al, 2020; Sharp et al, 2011), resulting in diminished prediction of the opponent’s behavior (and therefore worse task performance). Given that this is a first-of-its kind study, we tested the possibility that BPD pathology could lead to either a detriment or a benefit to task performance.…”

A normative account of self-deception, overconfidence, and paranoia

“…We adapted open-access code for an HGF with 2 streams of processing 25 directly from 2 nd level at time t, through a logistic sigmoid where:…”

“…As an alternate response model, we also examined the effect of adding a bias term to induce unequal weighting of the two streams as seen in Diaconescu et al (2014) 48 as well as Henco et al (2020) 25 , which ultimately did not produce a good fit to the behavioral data (model comparison values displayed in Table 5 for response models).…”