Objective investigation of activity preference in schizophrenia: A pilot study

Motivation deficits are a critical component of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (Foussias and Remington, 2010; Messinger et al., 2011), and have a direct impact on concurrent and longitudinal functional outcome (Fervaha et al., 2015b; Foussias et al., 2011), and potential influence on other important symptomatic features, such as cognition (Fervaha et al., 2014b; Foussias et al., 2015; Strauss et al., 2015). To date, objective task-based investigations in schizophrenia have characterized specific aspects of motivation, particularly aspects of reward processing, such as effort-based decision making (i.e., weighing the benefits of actions against degree of effort required), reinforcement learning (i.e., learning to pursue or avoid actions based on relative likelihood of obtaining rewards), reward anticipation (i.e., recognizing and responding to cues that precede rewards or penalties), and value representation (i.e., subjective internalized valuation of experiences and decisions) (Green et al., 2015; Horan et al., 2015; Reddy et al., 2015; Strauss et al., 2014).

Source: Psychiatry Research - May 17, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Ishraq Siddiqui, Gary Remington, Gagan Fervaha, Paul J. Fletcher, Aristotle N. Voineskos, Sarah Saperia, Konstantine K. Zakzanis, George Foussias Source Type: research