Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.
Desert Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center, Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA.
Schizophr Bull. 2019 Apr 25;45(3):620-628. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sby109.
Human beings find social stimuli rewarding, which is thought to facilitate efficient social functioning. Although reward processing has been extensively studied in schizophrenia, a few studies have examined neural processes specifically involved in social reward processing. This study examined neural sensitivity to social and nonsocial rewards in schizophrenia.
Twenty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 25 community controls completed a One-Armed Bandit Task, an implicit reinforcement learning task, in the scanner. There were 2 conditions with an identical trial structure, one with social rewards and the other with nonsocial rewards. The data were analyzed using a region of interest (ROI) approach, focusing on the ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex.
Across all 3 ROIs, patients showed reduced activation for social rewards compared to controls. However, the 2 groups showed comparable levels of activation for nonsocial rewards. Within the patient group, levels of neural activation in these ROIs during the social reward condition were associated with better performance.
This study found reduced neural sensitivity in patients with schizophrenia in key reward-processing regions for social but not for nonsocial rewards. These findings suggest a relatively specific social reward-processing deficit in schizophrenia during an implicit reinforcement learning task.
人类发现社会刺激是有回报的，这被认为有助于有效的社会功能。尽管奖赏处理在精神分裂症中已经得到了广泛的研究，但很少有研究专门研究涉及社会奖赏处理的神经过程。本研究探讨了精神分裂症患者对社会和非社会奖赏的神经敏感性。
27 名精神分裂症患者和 25 名社区对照者在扫描仪中完成了一项单臂强盗任务，这是一项内隐强化学习任务。有两种条件具有相同的试验结构，一种是社会奖励，另一种是非社会奖励。使用感兴趣区域（ROI）方法对数据进行分析，重点是腹侧纹状体、腹内侧前额叶皮质和前扣带皮质。
在所有 3 个 ROI 中，患者的社会奖励激活水平低于对照组。然而，两组对非社会奖励的激活水平相当。在患者组中，这些 ROI 中社会奖励条件下的神经激活水平与更好的表现相关。
本研究发现精神分裂症患者在关键的奖赏处理区域对社会奖赏的神经敏感性降低，但对非社会奖赏的敏感性没有降低。这些发现表明，在一项内隐强化学习任务中，精神分裂症患者存在相对特定的社会奖赏处理缺陷。
