Diagnostic labels: the problem is the signified not the signifier

Handerer, Fritz; Tai, Sara

doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(22)00111-0

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Finally, the experimental approach of inducing AH in healthy participants not only avoids the problem of confounding variables in clinical samples, but also circumvents the heterogeneity of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. During the last decades, there has been a strong debate in the field regarding the utility of diagnostic labels in psychiatry, especially when doing research (Handerer et al, 2022;Jablensky, 2016;Kinderman et al, 2013). Several authors argue that mental diagnoses are not a natural category, and thus should be avoided.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pavlovian conditioning-induced hallucinations reduce MMN amplitudes for duration but not frequency deviants

Rodriguez¹,

Moratti²

2022

Preprint

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The mismatch negativity (MMN) is an evoked potential that indexes auditory regularity violations. Since the 90’s, a reduced amplitude of this brain activity in patients with schizophrenia has been consistently reported. Recently, this alteration has been related to the presence of auditory hallucinations (AHs) rather than the schizophrenia diagnostic per se. However, making this attribution is rather problematic due to the high heterogeneity of symptoms in schizophrenia. In an attempt to isolate the AHs influence on the MMN amplitude from other cofounding variables, we artificially induced AHs in a non-clinical population by Pavlovian conditioning. Before and after conditioning, volunteers (N=31) participated in an oddball paradigm that elicited an MMN. Two different types of deviants were presented: a frequency and a duration deviant, as the MMN alteration seems to be especially present in schizophrenia with the latter type of deviant. Hence, this pre-post design allowed us to compare whether experiencing conditioning-induced AHs exert any influence on MMN amplitudes. Our results show that duration-deviant related MMN reductions significantly correlate with the amount of AHs experienced. Moreover, we found a significant correlation between AHs proneness (measured with the Launay-Slade Hallucination Extended Scale) and the number of AHs experienced during the paradigm. In sum, our study shows that AHs can be conditioned and exert similar effects on MMN modulation in healthy participants as has been reported for patients with schizophrenia. Thus, conditioning paradigms offer the possibility to study the association between hallucinations and MMN reductions without the confounding variables present in schizophrenia patients.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%