Browsing by Subject "persecutory ideation"

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    Behavioral Economics of Persecutory Delusions
    (2022-06) Kazinka, Rebecca
    Persecutory delusions cause significant distress in the individuals who experience them, yet as a field we are still working to understand their etiology. Persecutory delusions and suspiciousness have some overlap with mistrust, and thus this dissertation focuses on the use of trust games to examine behavior and neural mechanisms of spite sensitivity. Spite sensitivity is the fear that a partner is willing to take a hit in order to ensure that you do as well, as opposed to rational mistrust, in which a partner can make a gain but at your expense. The benefit of using social decision making tasks such as the Trust Game and its adaptation, the Minnesota Trust Game, is that 1) a computational model can be developed based on the given parameters of the task to understand beliefs and motivations and 2) it can provide a well-controlled task to examine principles of trust and spite sensitivity in neuroimaging. The goal of this dissertation is to provide evidence that spite sensitivity is an important construct to understand persecutory ideation and distrust, both in psychiatric populations but also the general population. I show that while the Trust Game identifies decreased trust in individuals with psychosis, the Minnesota Trust Game identifies that spite sensitivity is distinct from rational mistrust and can be measured computationally. Further examination in a group of individuals with psychosis show a neural dissociation between spite sensitivity and rational mistrust as well. We did not find this dissociation in a community sample of twins, yet did find a relationship between twin discordance in a computational measure of spite sensitivity and a personality measure of suspiciousness. Altogether, this dissertation provides a foundation for the use of spite sensitivity as a construct to understand persecutory ideation.
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    An Investigation Into The Neural Nature Of Persecutory Ideation
    (2016-12) Wisner, Krista
    Persecutory ideation is a common and distressing symptom that exists on a continuum with persecutory delusions. Although associated with severe negative consequences the neural mechanisms underlying persecutory ideation remain unclear. Contributing factors in this research deficit include i) low rates of studies specifically examining persecutory ideation, favoring instead broader symptom measurement, and ii) a lack of paradigms that sufficiently engage or examine specific mechanisms associated with the symptom. In this dissertation, a wide range of literature is reviewed to identify brain regions consistently associated with delusions or positive symptoms in order to aid development of a model of persecutory ideation and stimulate research. Brain regions highlighted by the review represented a convergence of neurobiological models of delusions, and were the focus of two empirical studies. In the first study we employed a novel economic social decision-making task in two samples during neuroimaging. We demonstrated a dorsal anterior cingulate and anterior insula (dACC-AI) network, a left frontal-parietal (lF-P) network, and a ventral medial orbital prefrontal (vmPFC/OFC) network were associated with distinct forms of distrust. We then revealed only the connectivity between the vmPFC/OFC and lF-P networks predicted persecutory ideation, suggesting a role of weakened top-down control on subjective valuation. Moreover, we established this mechanism was associated with unique environmental influence in community monozygotic twins. In our second study we aimed to replicate the task-based finding in two resting-state samples to demonstrate generalizability of the mechanism; however, confirmatory analyses did not replicate. In summary, the posited vmPFC/OFC - lF-P interconnectivity mechanism of persecutory ideation appears to be uniquely evoked by the economic social decision-making task. While this provides a novel perspective on persecutory ideation, replications in larger samples are needed.
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    Resting-State Networks Associated with Behavioral and Self-Reported Measures of Persecutory Ideation in Psychosis
    (2022-01) Yu, Lingyan
    Persecutory ideations are self-referential delusions of being the target of malevolence despite a lack of evidence. Wisner et al. (2021) found that reduced connectivity between the left frontoparietal (lFP) network and parts of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) correlated with increased persecutory behaviors among psychotic patients performing in an economic social decision-making task that can measure the anticipation of a partner’s spiteful behavior. If this pattern could be observed in the resting state, it would suggest a functional-structural prior predisposing individuals to persecutory ideation. Forty-four patients in the early course of a psychotic disorder provided data for resting-state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging across nine brain networks that included the FP network and a similar OFC region. As predicted, we found a significant and negative correlation between the lFP–OFC at rest and the level of suspicious mistrust on the decision-making task using a within-group correlational design. Additionally, self-reported persecutory ideation correlated significantly with the connectivity between the right frontoparietal (rFP) network and the OFC. We extended the previous finding of reduced connectivity between the lFP network and the OFC in psychosis patients to the resting state, and observed a possible hemispheric difference, such that greater rFP–OFC connectivity predicted elevated self-reported persecutory ideation, suggesting potential differences between the lFP and rFP roles in persecutory social interactions.