Psychometrics of social cognitive measures for psychosis treatment research

Abstract

Social cognition represents an important treatment target, closely linked to everyday social function. While a number of social cognitive interventions have recently been developed, measures used to evaluate these treatments are only beginning to receive psychometric scrutiny. Study goals were to replicate recently-published psychometrics for several social cognitive measures, and to provide information for additional social cognitive measures not included in recent reports. Forty-eight outpatients with psychotic-spectrum disorders completed measures of emotion perception, theory of mind, and attributional bias on two occasions, one month apart. Measures were tested for distributional characteristics, test-retest reliability, utility as a repeated measure, and relationship to symptoms and functioning. For a subgroup of participants, information about sensitivity to social cognitive treatment was also available. We replicated aspects of prior work, including largely favorable psychometric characteristics for the Bell-Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task, and promising but weaker characteristics for The Awareness of Social Inferences Test subscales and Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task. The Hinting Task had adequate test-retest statistics but a more pronounced ceiling effect. Ambiguous Intentions and Hostility Questionnaire data showed evidence of validity but were limited by inconsistency over time. Our results strongly support the Davos Assessment of Cognitive Biases Scale for future evaluation as a social cognitive treatment outcome measure. Its scores were adequately distributed, consistent over time, related to symptoms and functioning, and sensitive to treatment effects. Other relatively novel assessments of attributional bias and theory of mind showed some promise, although more work is needed.

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…Specifically, the RMET indexes only the ability to accurately label a decontextualized facial emotional expression (see Aviezer et al 2017); how this ability relates to general social understanding is not clear (see Oakley et al 2016). As well, a recent meta-analysis of the psychometric properties of the CS revealed a negatively skewed pattern suggesting possible ceiling effects; it may not be well-suited for investigating individual differences (Davidson et al 2018), and thus is likely inappropriate for assessing relationships between social reasoning and CTC.…”

Sexual abuse and physical neglect in childhood are associated with affective theory of mind in adults with schizophrenia

“…The social cognitive measures used in the above-mentioned studies have all been criticized, for various reasons. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test may be a measure of emotion recognition and not of ToM ( Oakley et al, 2016 ), the Hinting Task can produce ceiling effects ( Davidson et al, 2018 ; Frøyhaug et al, 2019 ), and the MCCB subtest may be a poor operationalization of social cognition in younger participants ( Holmén et al, 2010 ). Further, none of them has convincing ecological validity, i.e.…”

Attributional Styles and Social Functioning in Schizophrenia. Is the Learned Helplessness Model Suitable?

“…Results provide evidence for the utility and adequacy of both reformulated Learned Helplessness Model (Abramson et al, 1978) and its more fully articulated form, the Hopelessness Theory of Depression (Davidson et al, 2018;Haeffel et al, 2017), to predict depression in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Comparing to a non-clinical group, persons with psychosis show an increased negative attribution bias.…”

“…Beyond this, "hopelessness", regardless of depressive symptoms, predicts a worse global functioning and is an important risk factor for suicidal behaviour (Cassidy et al, 2018). Given the importance of depressive symptoms (Berardelli et al, 2019;Davidson et al, 2018) and the increased "helplessness" (a bias to externalise both positive and negative events) found in persons with psychosis (Lincoln et al, 2010), the present study aimed to verify whether the reformulated Learned Helplessness Model and the more fully articulated form, Hopelessness Theory of Depression, may be specifically suitable to predict depressive symptoms in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Moreover, our principal focus is not to demonstrate the relationship between attribution styles and psychotic symptoms that influent models satisfactorily explain (Bentall et al, 2001;Garety & Freeman, 2013;Moritz et al, 2018;Murphy et al, 2018) but to test their utility to explain increased depressive patterns and predict SF in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.…”