Mellick William, Sharp Carla, Sumlin Eric
Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Houston, TX, USA.
Scand J Child Adolesc Psychiatr Psychol. 2019 May 30;7:92-96. doi: 10.21307/sjcapp-2019-013. eCollection 2019.
Interpersonal trust is an important target for the conceptualization, identification, and treatment of psychiatric disorders marked by interpersonal difficulties. A core feature of adolescent externalising disorders is interpersonal impairment. However, research investigating trust is scarce. A relatively novel approach for studying trust in psychopathology is through examination of social decision making using behavioural economic games.
To employ a modified trust game in order to determine whether externalising adolescents exhibit perturbed decision making in social and/or nonsocial contexts.
Externalising inpatient adolescents ( = 141) and non-externalising psychiatric controls ( = 122) completed self-report measures of psychopathology and invested in an iterative trust game played under two conditions: social (trust) and nonsocial (lottery condition), each consisting of five consecutive trials.
Externalising adolescents showed a limited increase in trust investments, compared to a significant increase in lottery investments, across early game trials relative to psychiatric controls. This significant three-way interaction between experimental group, game condition, and trials became most evident at the second trial of games. Between-group differences on trust investments were non-significant. However, externalising adolescents invested significantly less in the trust relative to lottery condition, an effect unobserved in psychiatric controls.
This study tentatively suggests that adolescent externalising disorders may be associated with an insensitivity to normative social exchange which may arise, in part, from a lack of anticipated co-player reciprocity. It is not the level of trust that may distinguish externalising adolescents but perhaps the form of which the trust exchange takes shape. Conclusions are tempered by the fact that the employed trust game did not include feedback in the form of co-player repayments.
人际信任是针对以人际困难为特征的精神障碍进行概念化、识别和治疗的重要目标。青少年外化障碍的一个核心特征是人际功能受损。然而，关于信任的研究却很匮乏。一种相对新颖的研究精神病理学中信任的方法是通过使用行为经济游戏来检验社会决策。
采用一种改良的信任游戏，以确定外化型青少年在社交和/或非社交情境中是否表现出决策紊乱。
外化型住院青少年（n = 141）和非外化型精神科对照者（n = 122）完成了精神病理学的自我报告测量，并在两种条件下进行了迭代信任游戏：社交（信任）和非社交（彩票条件），每种条件由五个连续试验组成。
与精神科对照者相比，外化型青少年在游戏早期试验中，信任投资的增加有限，而彩票投资显著增加。实验组、游戏条件和试验之间的这种显著的三向交互作用在游戏的第二次试验时最为明显。信任投资的组间差异不显著。然而，外化型青少年在信任条件下的投资相对于彩票条件显著减少，这一效应在精神科对照者中未观察到。
本研究初步表明，青少年外化障碍可能与对规范社会交换不敏感有关，这可能部分源于缺乏对共同参与者互惠的预期。区分外化型青少年的可能不是信任水平，而是信任交换形成的形式。由于所采用的信任游戏没有包括共同参与者回报形式的反馈，因此结论受到一定限制。
