Positive and negative subclinical symptoms and MCCB performance in non-psychiatric controls

Publication date: December 2014 Source:Schizophrenia Research: Cognition, Volume 1, Issue 4 Author(s): Cole Korponay , George C. Nitzburg , Anil K. Malhotra , Pamela DeRosse Considerable data support the phenomenological and temporal continuity between subclinical psychosis and psychotic disorders. In recent years, neurocognitive deficits have increasingly been recognized as a core feature of psychotic illness but there are few data seeking to elucidate the relationship between subclinical psychosis and neurocogntive deficits in non-clinical samples. The goal of the present study was to examine the relationship between subclinical positive and negative symptoms, as measured by the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE) and performance on the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) in a large (n=303) and demographically diverse non-clinical sample. We found that compared to participants with low levels of subclinical positive symptoms, participants with high levels of subclinical positive symptoms performed significantly better in the domains of working memory (p<.001), verbal learning (p=.007) and visual learning (p=.014). Although comparison of participants with high and low levels of subclinical negative symptoms revealed no differences in MCCB performance, we found that individuals with high levels of subclinical negative symptoms performed significantly better on a measure of estimated IQ (WRAT-3 Reading subtest; p=.02) than those with low le...
Source: Schizophrenia Research: Cognition - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research