The Association between Basic Self-disturbance and Impaired Metacognition in Help-seeking Adolescents at High versus Low-risk for Psychosis.
Poster C110, Saturday, October 22, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Le Baron
Danny Koren1,2, Ravit Scheyer1, Noa Reznik1, Merav Adres1, Alan Apter3, Josef Parnas4, Larry J. Seidman5; 1Psychology Department, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 2Psychiatry Division, Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, 3Psychological Medicine Divison, Schneider Children Medical Center, Petach Tiqva, Israel, 4Psychiatric Center, Glostrup-Hvidovre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Brøndby, Denmark, 5The Massachusetts Mental Health Center Public Psychiatry Division of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Background and Objective: The goal of this study was to advance the understanding of the neurocognitive underpinnings of basic self-disturbance (SD) by assessing the association between deficits in cognitive and metacognitive functioning and SD among help-seeking adolescents at low versus high-risk for psychosis. Method: Seventy-one help-seeking, non-psychotic adolescents (age 13-18) were assessed with the Examination of Anomalous Self-experience (EASE), Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ), Structured Interview for Prodromal Syndromes (SIPS), and a metacognitive version of two non-social (verbal memory and executive functioning) and two social (facial emotion perception and theory of mind) cognition tasks. In addition to the standard administration of the tasks, subjects were also asked to rate their level of confidence on each answer, and to choose whether they wanted it to be “counted” toward their overall performance score on the task. Results: As expected, SD had higher correlations with the metacognitive indices derived from confidence ratings and volunteered sorts than with the conventional cognitive scores. However, these correlations were modest at best and only in the high-risk group. Moreover, contrary to our hypotheses, some of these correlations were in the positive direction. Conclusions: These preliminary results suggest that SD may be more strongly related to metacognitive monitoring and control than to cognitive deficits per se. In addition, they suggest that SD is related to better rather than poorer metacognitive functioning. This unexpected finding can be explained by the occasional hyperreflectivity that characterizes individuals with SD. However, given its post-hoc nature, this interpretation should be taken with caution.
Topic Area: Ultra High Risk / Prodromal Research