Automatic And Controlled Components Of Attribution Biases In Schizophrenia; Examination Of Novel Measures Of Intentionality And Immorality Bias

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Buck, Benjamin
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

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Social cognition is a strong predictor of outcome in schizophrenia and it is responsive to psychosocial intervention. In schizophrenia research, it has been shown to comprise two categories of cognitive variables, skills and biases. Existing measures of one core social cognitive bias – hostile attribution bias – do not allow access to assessment of the processes underlying such judgments, they conflate multiple constructs, and relationships to criterion outcomes are modest. To address these limitations, the present study applied two innovative paradigms from social psychology – the intentionality bias (Rosset, 2008) and the immorality bias (Hester, Payne & Gray, 2017) – to a sample of individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and a comparison group of non-clinical controls. Results suggested that individuals with schizophrenia do present with an elevated bias to interpret intentionality in others’ ambiguous actions, and this bias appears modestly related to interpersonal conflict, paranoia, hostile cognition and behavior, though unrelated to positive symptoms. The immorality bias, on the other hand, was not elevated in schizophrenia or paranoia, nor was it related to any disorder-related processes. In examining parameters separating controlled and automatic processes, the present study raises a number of questions about measurement of biases and dual-process procedures in schizophrenia.

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