Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms

Barnby, Joseph M; Dayan, Peter; Bell, Vaughan

doi:10.31234/osf.io/djwuf

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 115 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is also predicted by the Social Deafferentation Hypothesis [99]; perceptions become imbued with social representations which provide familiar comfort and/or distress. Formal models may be used to assess alterations in the generation of and application of spontaneous social representations under conditions of ambiguity [100]. Probing the relationship between high-order beliefs about the self (schema, etc.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Felt Presence experience: From cognition to the clinic

Barnby¹,

Park²,

Baxter³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Felt Presence (FP) experience is the basic feeling that someone else is present in the immediate environment, without any other clear sensory evidence. Ranging from benevolent to distressing, personified to ambiguous, FP has been observed in neuropsychological case studies, within psychosis and paranoia, associated with sleep paralysis, anxiety, and recorded within endurance sports and spiritualist communities. In this review we summarise the philosophical and phenomenological, clinical and non-clinical correlates of FP, as well current measurement using psychometric, cognitive, and neurophysiological methods. We present current mechanistic explanations for FP, suggest a unifying cognitive framework for the phenomenon, and discuss outstanding questions for the field. FP offers a sublime window of opportunity to understand the cognitive neuroscience of own-body awareness and social agency detection; an intuitive, but poorly understood experience in health and disorder.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Felt Presence experience: From cognition to the clinic

Barnby¹,

Park²,

Baxter³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Modelling the Longitudinal Dynamics of Paranoia in Psychosis: A Temporal Network Analysis Over 20 Years

Barnby

Haslbeck

Rosen

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Paranoia is a highly debilitating, core element of psychosis, although is poorly managed. Theories of paranoia mostly interface with short-scale or cross-sectional data models, leaving the longitudinal course of paranoia underspecified. Here, we develop an empirical characterisation of two aspects of paranoia - persecutory and referential delusions - in individuals with psychosis over 20 years. We examine delusional dynamics by applying a Graphical Vector Autoregression Model to data collected from the Chicago Follow-up Study. We adjusted for age, sex, IQ, and antipsychotic use. We found that referential and persecutory delusions are central themes, supported by other primary delusions, and are strongly autoregressive. In a second analysis we demonstrate that social factors influence the severity of referential, but not persecutory, delusions. We suggest that persecutory delusions represent central, resistant states in the cognitive landscape, whereas referential beliefs are more flexible, offering an important window of opportunity for intervention. Our data models can be collated with prior biological, computational, and social work to contribute toward a more complete theory of paranoia and provide more time-dependent evidence for optimal treatment targets.

show abstract

D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes

Barnby

Bell

Deeley

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Striatal dopamine is important to paranoid attributions, although its computational role in social inference remains elusive. We employed a simple game theoretic paradigm and a formal Bayesian model of intentional attributions to investigate dopamine D2/D3 antagonism on ongoing mental state inference following joint social outcomes. Haloperidol, compared to placebo, enhanced the impact of behaviour on beliefs about the harmful intent of a partner, and increased learning from recent encounters. These alterations caused significant changes to model covariation and induced negatively correlated self-interest and harmful intent attributions. Our findings suggest haloperidol improves flexibility in model-based beliefs about others and simultaneously reduces the self-relevance of observations. Our results may be representative of D2/D3 dopamine’s role in supporting self-relevant mentalisation. Our data and model bridge theory between general and social accounts of value representation. We demonstrate initial evidence for the sensitivity of our model and short social paradigm to drug intervention and clinical dimensions, allowing distinctions between mechanisms that operate across traits and states.Graphical Abstract

show abstract

Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms

Cited by 3 publications

References 115 publications

The Felt Presence experience: From cognition to the clinic

The Felt Presence experience: From cognition to the clinic

Modelling the Longitudinal Dynamics of Paranoia in Psychosis: A Temporal Network Analysis Over 20 Years

D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About