Bayesian Reasoning with Emotional Material in Patients with Schizophrenia

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  • Veronica Romero-Ferreiro
    Universidad Europea de Madrid
  • Rosario Susi
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  • Eva Maria Sanchez Morla
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  • Paloma Mari-Beffa
  • Pablo Rodriguez-Gomez
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  • Julia Amador
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  • Eva Maria Moreno
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  • Carmen Romero Ferreiro
    Universidad Francisco de Vitoria
  • Natalia Martinez-Garcia
    Universidad Europea de Madrid
  • Roberto Rodriguez-Jimenez
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Delusions are one of the most classical symptoms described in schizophrenia. However, despite delusions seldom exist in the absence of affective content, they have been investigated using tasks involving non-affective material, such as the Beads task. In this study we compared 30 patients with schizophrenia experiencing delusions with 32 matched controls in their pattern of responses to two versions of the Beads task within a Bayesian framework. The two versions of the Beads task consisted of one emotional and one neutral, both with ratios of beads of 60:40 and 80:20, considered respectively as the ‘difficult’ and ‘easy’ variants of the task. Results indicate that patients showed a greater deviation from the normative model, especially in the 60:40 ratio, suggesting that more inaccurate probability estimations are more likely to occur under uncertainty conditions. Additionally, patients show a greater deviation in the emotional version of the task, providing evidence of a reasoning bias modulated by the content of the stimuli. These results contribute to the understanding of how cognitive mechanisms interact with characteristics of the task (i.e., ambiguity and content) in the context of delusional thinking. These findings might be used to inform improved intervention programs in the domain of inferential reasoning.
Original languageEnglish
Article number6768
Number of pages8
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume13
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Nov 2022

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