Silverstein Steven M, Thompson Judy L, Gold James M, Schiffman Jason, Waltz James A, Williams Trevor F, Zinbarg Richard E, Mittal Vijay A, Ellman Lauren M, Strauss Gregory P, Walker Elaine F, Woods Scott W, Levin Jason A, Kafadar Eren, Kenney Joshua, Smith Dillon, Powers Albert R, Corlett Philip R
University of Rochester Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.
University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA.
NPJ Schizophr. 2021 May 17;7(1):26. doi: 10.1038/s41537-021-00156-1.
Identifying state-sensitive measures of perceptual and cognitive processes implicated in psychosis may allow for objective, earlier, and better monitoring of changes in mental status that are predictive of an impending psychotic episode, relative to traditional self-report-based clinical measures. To determine whether a measure of visual perception that has demonstrated sensitivity to the clinical state of schizophrenia in multiple prior studies is sensitive to features of the at-risk mental state, we examined differences between young people identified as being at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR; n = 37) and non-psychiatric matched controls (n = 29) on the Mooney Faces Test (MFT). On each trial of the MFT, participants report whether they perceive a face in a degraded face image. The CHR group reported perceiving a greater number of faces in both upright and inverted MFT stimuli. Consistent with prior work, males reported more faces on the MFT than females in both conditions. However, the finding of greater reported face perception among CHR subjects was robustly observed in the female CHR group relative to the female control group. Among male CHR participants, greater reported face perception was related to increased perceptual abnormalities. These preliminary results are consistent with a small but growing literature suggesting that heightened perceptual sensitivity may characterize individuals at increased clinical risk for psychosis. Further studies are needed to determine the contributions of specific perceptual, cognitive, and motivational mechanisms to the findings.
识别与精神病相关的感知和认知过程的状态敏感测量方法，相对于传统的基于自我报告的临床测量方法，可能有助于对预示即将发生精神病发作的精神状态变化进行客观、早期和更好的监测。为了确定一种在多项先前研究中已证明对精神分裂症临床状态敏感的视觉感知测量方法是否对处于精神病风险状态的特征敏感，我们在穆尼面部测试（MFT）中检查了被确定为处于精神病临床高风险（CHR；n = 37）的年轻人与非精神病匹配对照组（n = 29）之间的差异。在MFT的每次试验中，参与者报告他们是否在一张退化的面部图像中感知到一张脸。CHR组报告在直立和倒置的MFT刺激中都感知到更多的脸。与先前的研究一致，在两种情况下，男性在MFT中报告感知到的脸比女性更多。然而，相对于女性对照组，在女性CHR组中有力地观察到CHR受试者报告的面部感知更强这一发现。在男性CHR参与者中，报告的更强面部感知与感知异常增加有关。这些初步结果与少量但不断增加的文献一致，表明感知敏感性增强可能是临床精神病风险增加个体的特征。需要进一步的研究来确定特定的感知、认知和动机机制对这些发现的贡献。
