Can RDoC Help Find Order in Thought Disorder?

Abstract

Thought disorder is a pernicious and nonspecific aspect of numerous serious mental illnesses (SMIs) and related conditions. Despite decades of empirical research on thought disorder, our present understanding of it is poor, our clinical assessments focus on a limited set of extreme behaviors, and treatments are palliative at best. Applying a Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework to thought disorder research offers advantages to explicate its phenotype; isolate its mechanisms; and develop more effective assessments, treatments, and potential cures. In this commentary, we discuss ways in which thought disorder can be understood within the RDoC framework. We propose operationalizing thought disorder within the RDoC construct of language using psycholinguistic sciences, to help objectify and quantify language within individuals; technologically sophisticated paradigms, to allow naturalistic behavioral sampling techniques with unprecedented ecological validity; and computational modeling, to account for a network of interconnected and dynamic linguistic, cognitive, affective, and social functions. We also highlight challenges for understanding thought disorder within an RDoC framework. Thought disorder likely does not occur as an isomorphic dysfunction in a single RDoC construct, but rather, as multiple potential dysfunctions in a network of RDoC constructs. Moreover, thought disorder is dynamic over time and context within individuals. In sum, RDoC is a useful framework to integrate multidisciplinary research efforts aimed at operationalizing, understanding, and ameliorating thought disorder.

Cross Talk: The Microbiota and Neurodevelopmental Disorders

“…Functional dimensional constructs grouped into domains such as negative valance (acute threat (fear), potential threat (anxiety), sustained threat, loss, frustrative non-reward), positive valence (approach motivation, initial responsiveness to reward attainment, sustained/longer term responsiveness to reward attainment, reward learning, habit), cognitive (attention, perception, declarative memory, language, cognitive control, working memory), social processing (affiliation and attachment, social communication, perception, and understanding of self/others), and arousal/regulatory systems (arousal, circadian rhythms, sleep-wakefulness) examined across units of analysis from genes, molecules, cells, circuits, physiology, neuroimaging, behavior and self-report have been proposed (Insel et al, 2010 ). This dimensional approach is more difficult in disorders such as psychosis, compared to mood disorders, but this exciting process has begun (Reininghaus et al, 2016a ; Cohen et al, 2017 ; Joyce et al, 2017 ). By deconstructing heterogenous systems-disorders (Öngür, 2017 ; Silbersweig and Loscalzo, 2017 ), such as schizophrenia into transdiagnostic constructs, and stratifying subgroups of patients based on similar pathophysiology, such as microbiome alterations and related signaling pathways, this opens up the possibility to advance personalized and precision treatments options (Kaiser and Feng, 2015 ).…”

Thought Disorder, Subjectivity, and the Self

“…The conceptualizations on which we rely are associated with the ipseity-or basic-self-disturbance model, a prominent model in phenomenological psychopathology of schizophrenia 28,29 (Some rather different approaches to "thought disorder" are presented in this journal issue: in the review by Hart and Lewine, 5 and in commentaries that emphasize the importance of "adopting statistical and mathematical approaches to linguistics and semantics so as to enable precise operationalization and measurement" 31 or psycholinguistic and computational sciences in service of "quantifying an individual's 'symbolic representations'". 32 ).…”

Thoughts About Disordered Thinking: Measuring and Quantifying the Laws of Order and Disorder

“…2 Current investigative approaches for patient level studies are discussed in a commentary by Cohen et al (this issue). 3 To study the fundamental mechanisms involved in psychopathology the field often employs animal models. This is challenging for thought disorder pathology which is manifest in language.…”