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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title How far to go in deconstructing negative symptoms? Behavioural and neural level evidence for the amotivation domain
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Mariia Kaliuzhna
  • Matthias Kirschner
  • Fabien Carruzzo
  • Matthias N Hartmann-Riemer
  • Martin Bischof
  • Erich Seifritz
  • Philippe Tobler
  • Stefan Kaiser
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Schizophrenia Research
Publisher Elsevier
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0920-9964
Volume 236
Page Range 41 - 47
Date 2021
Abstract Text Negative symptoms in schizophrenia are conceptualised as loading onto two factors: amotivation and diminished expression, which relate to different behavioural and neural markers. This distinction has proven useful for understanding the cognitive, motivational and neural mechanisms involved in negative symptoms, and for the development of treatments. Recently, it has been advocated that an even finer distinction into five subdomains is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying negative symptoms, and to prevent masking specific treatment and intervention effects. However, it is currently unclear whether such a fine-grained approach offers additional insights grounded in theory. In the present work, we focused on the factor amotivation, which has been shown to selectively correlate with the propensity to discount rewards in the face of effort and with the activity in the ventral striatum during reward anticipation. In a reanalysis of these studies we explored whether subdomains of amotivation – avolition, asociality, anhedonia – showed preferential correlation with these previously identified behavioural and neural markers. We show that for both behavioural and neural markers, a fine-grained model with the three subdomains did not better explain the data than a model with the amotivation factor only. Moreover, none of the three subdomains correlated significantly more or less with the behavioural or neural markers. Thus, no additional information was gained on amotivation in schizophrenia by selectively looking at its three subdomains. Consequently, the two-factor solution currently remains a valid option for the study of negative symptoms and further research is needed for behavioural and neural validation of the five-factor model.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1016/j.schres.2021.08.007
PubMed ID 34390980
Other Identification Number merlin-id:21443
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Keywords Schizophrenia, negative symptoms, amotivation, effort-based decision making, reward anticipation, two-factor solution