Emotion Recognition and Impulsive Choice in Relation to Methamphetamine Use and Psychosis Symptoms

Abstract

Introduction:The cognitive profiles of people with methamphetamine use disorder are characterized by impulsivity and impairment in social cognition. However, previous studies have not fully accounted for the presence and impact of co-occurring mental health problems on these domains. For instance, psychotic symptoms are commonly experienced by people who use methamphetamine and may influence cognitive performance. We aimed to examine decision making and emotion recognition in individuals with methamphetamine use, compared to healthy controls, to map the nature and degree of impairments in relation to the presence of psychotic symptoms.Method: In this naturalistic study, we assessed reward-based decision-making and facial emotion recognition across three groups, methamphetamine-using individuals with (MAP, n = 29) and without psychotic symptoms (MNP, n = 70), and healthy controls (HC, n = 32). Results:In comparison to healthy controls, methamphetamine-using individuals presented with poorer performance on tasks of decision-making and emotion recognition. Emotion recognition was impaired across all methamphetamine-using individuals, with significantly poorer recognition of anger and sadness in those with psychotic symptoms. Conclusion:We found specific impairments in emotion recognition in relation to psychotic symptoms in people who use methamphetamine regularly. This builds on previous evidence on cognitive profiles in methamphetamine use disorder, highlighting the need to assess co-morbid mental health and psychotic symptoms. Our finding that methamphetamine-using individuals with psychotic symptoms present with particular difficulties recognizing anger has implications for frontline clinicians.

Comparison of Methamphetamine Induced Psychosis and Primary Psychotic Disorder: Scoping Review of Social Cognition

“…As stated earlier, the selected studies are the one on the schizophrenia population that didn't excluded METH users and the studies on METH users that didn't excluded participants with a psychotic disorder. Among those 17 studies, only two looked at the difference between METH users with and without psychosis 44,45 . Furthermore, the Table illustrates how certain domains of social cognition merit to be studied in METH users, as well as in MIPD.…”

“…Only two studies, including a meta-analysis, mentioned social knowledge and attributional biases 56,57 , with a third one mentioning social perception as well 46 . With deficits in ToM and emotion recognition being the main focus in most studies 44,48,49,57 , more research is warranted on social knowledge, attributional biases and social perception, as these are also important domains of social cognition. In the literature, studies (that excluded comorbidity profiles) have reported that deficits in social cognition have a considerable impact on social functioning in people with schizophrenia 64,65 and in stimulant users [66][67][68] .…”

“…Only two articles directly compared METH users with and without psychotic symptoms. The first article 44 found that METH users with psychotic symptoms generally showed poorer scores on emotion recognition when compared to non-psychotic METH users (p < .001). A significant difference was also found between METH users with psychosis and healthy controls at correctly identifying discrete emotions; whereas no significant difference was found between non-psychotic METH users and healthy controls.…”

Evaluación de la Intervención Preventiva para Estudiantes Adolescentes en Riesgo (IPEA-R) en estudiantes de secundaria

“…Esta impulsividad como rasgo de personalidad es frecuentemente relacionada con la búsqueda de sensaciones y la necesidad de experimentar variadas conductas de riesgo, por sus refuerzos inmediatos (Arunogiri et al, 2019;Gámez & Villa, 2015;Gutiérrez et al, 2013). Se ha observado que la impulsividad es mayor en jóvenes con adicción a diferencia de aquellos que no presentan alguna adicción (Pérez-Fuentes et al, 2015) y se define como la tendencia de los adolescentes a hacer las cosas sin pensar, por lo que en muchos casos no logran anticipar las consecuencias positivas o negativas de sus conductas (Limonero et al, 2013).…”

Impaired social decision‐making in males with methamphetamine use disorder

“…5 Increasing evidence suggests that individuals with MUD have an impaired ability to correctly identify emotions and infer the mental state of others. [19][20][21][22] Specifically, individuals with MUD are less empathetic and have more difficulty understanding another's thoughts, feelings and intentions. Many studies with drug-free participants have demonstrated that impairments in empathy or theory of mind are associated with antisocial or offending behaviours.…”