Emotional response in schizophrenia to the “36 questions that lead to love”: Predicted and experienced emotions regarding a live social interaction

Abstract

Evidence suggests that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) report anticipatory pleasure deficits compared to controls and that these deficits are linked to decreased motivation to engage socially. However, these deficits have been identified via self-report measures of hypothetical pleasant stimuli, leaving it unclear whether they exist in reference to actual social situations. To address this issue, we created a live social interaction that minimized the reliance of higher-order cognitive processes. SZ and control participants were told that they would be playing an "enjoyable sharing game" with another study participant (who was actually a confederate) that involved asking and answering questions (36 interpersonal closeness generation questions; Aron et al., 1997). Participants then reported their current mood and the emotions they anticipated experiencing during the pleasant social interaction. Immediately following the interaction, they reported their experienced emotions. We found that the SZ group anticipated more negative emotion ( d = 1.0), but were less accurate in forecasting negative emotion ( d = .81), than controls, and these effects were large. There were small, non-significant group differences in anticipation, experience, and accuracy in forecasting of positive emotion (all d s < .29). Also, social anhedonia was positively correlated with anticipated negative affect and negatively associated with experienced positive emotion. At the same time, controls reported finding the interaction to be a more positive emotional experience overall, d = 0.75. This is the first study to show that "anticipatory pleasure deficits" in SZ might actually be heightened anticipated negative emotion and that inaccurate forecasting could be linked to decreased social motivation.

Mindfulness-based mobile applications for social interaction in people with schizophrenia

“…Emotional instability affects social responses and the interest and motivation of people with schizophrenia to interact with others (Kanchanatawan et al, 2017). This is supported by previous research by Martin et al (2019) which showed that persons with schizophrenia had severe emotional instability in their social interactions. Affective aspects can be trained by controlling emotions and increasing interest in recovery in people with schizophrenia (Hendler et al, 2018).…”

Increasing anticipated and anticipatory pleasure through episodic thinking.

“…Future research may assess this generalizability in the context of anticipated and anticipatory pleasure. Future research may also assess anticipated negative affect for positive events, especially given that recent research indicates that individuals with schizophrenia anticipate more negative affect in relation to social interactions (Martin, Castro, Li, Urban, & Moore, 2019) and can feel more negative affect, compared to healthy controls, after engaging in positive mental imagery exercises (Mote & Kring, 2019). It has been shown in healthy samples that higher detail when imagining prosocial episodes can predict stronger behavioral intentions, even in the context of a negatively valenced social encounter (Gaesser, DiBiase, & Kensinger, 2017).…”

How did that interaction make you feel? The relationship between quality of everyday social experiences and emotion in people with and without schizophrenia

“…Anhedonia, both social and non-social, is a component of negative symptoms that has been linked to functioning impairments that are stable across the course of the disorder [7]. However, fundamental research in controlled settings shows that people with SZ have intact hedonic experience in the presence of positively-valenced stimuli [8], as well as evidence of intact hedonic experience in the presence of positive social interactions [9,10]. It may be that people with SZ experience social pleasure in-the-moment but underreport these experiences due to method features of clinical and trait-based assessments (e.g., retrospective reporting, aggregation of affective experiences over time).…”