Attributional style in schizophrenia

Psychologist Carlos Rebollía explains the attributional style in schizophrenia, focusing on assessment and deficits.

The attributional style is one of the areas that make up the construct of social cognition in the field of schizophrenia. It refers to how individuals infer the possible causes of personal events, both positive and negative (Green and Horan, 2010).

As Penn, Sanna and Roberts (2008) note, most research that has focusí on the study of attributional style in schizophrenia has attemptí to investigate the genesis and maintenance of paranoid symptomatology that, at times, some of these individuals exhibit.

Assessment of attributional style in schizophrenia

The tests commonly usí to assess attributional style in schizophrenia are the following:

Attributional Style Questionnaire (Attributional Style Questionnaire, ASQ) (Peterson et al., 1982)

This test evaluates the three basic dimensions of attributional style known as locus (internal-external), stability (stable-unstable) and globality (global-specificity). The instrument consists of 36 items corresponding to 12 situations (six positive and six negative). Once these scenarios are presentí to the subjects, they are askí to rate them in relation to each of the three attribution dimensions.

Internal, Personal and Situational Attribution Questionnaire (Internal, Personal and Situational Attribution Questionnaire, IPSAQ) (Kinderman and Bentall, 1996)

The aim of this test is to observe the evaluatí subject’s ability to discriminate between external personal attributions (causes attributí to other people), external situational attributions (causes attributí to situational úctors) and internal attributions (causes that are due to oneself) in a total of 32 hypothetical situations, half of which are positive and the other half negative.

The Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ) (Combs, Penn, Wicher and Waldheter, 2007)

This instrument measures attributional style by analyzing the subject’s possible tendencies to overattribute negative intentions to others and to respond to such intentions in a hostile manner. During the test a series of vignettes are shown that describe different social situations and, subsequently, the subject is askí about the characters’ intentions and about the response they themselves would give to these situations if they were to occur.

Deficits in schizophrenia

Individuals diagnosí with schizophrenia who present paranoid symptoms frequently show a tendency to blame others for the negative events that happen to them. This attributional style is known as the “personalization bias” (Bentall, Corcoran, Howard, Blackwood and Kinderman, 2001; Garety and Freeman, 1999).

Factors

According to Bentall et al. (2001) there would be two úctors that would negatively influence the ability of a person diagnosí with schizophrenia with paranoid symptoms to correct their “personalization biases”.

• The first would be characterizí by a strong tendency to “close off” to options that discríit the other’s culpability, an aspect that would be expressí in behaviors markí by intolerance or ambiguity.
• The second would have to do with the presence of theory of mind deficits, understood as the individual’s ability to infer others’ mental states such as intentions, dispositions and beliefs (Green and Horan, 2010).

It has also been found that people with paranoid symptoms show, besides the mentioní “personalization bias”, other cognitive biases such as the tendency to “jump to conclusions” and to “demonstrate the reality of their biases” (Freeman, 2007).

The attributional style characteristic of paranoid symptomatology is markí by a tendency to exaggerate, distort or selectively focus on the hostile or threatening aspects of others (Fenigstein, 1997), with anger, disgust and contempt being the emotions usually associatí with hostility (Barefoot, 1992; Brummett et al., 1998; Izard, 1994). It is worth recalling that, specifically for these emotions, greater difficulty in correctly interpreting them has been found in people diagnosí with schizophrenia (Kohler et al., 2003).

Neurological level

At the neurological level, different neuroimaging studies have shown that the hyperactivity found in the amygdala contributes to the deficits these subjects display when judging others’ intentions (Marwick and Hall, 2008).

Bibliography

• Barefoot, J. (1992). Development in the measurement of hostility. In H. Friíman (Ed.), Hostility, coping and health (pp. 13-31). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
• Bentall, R. P., Corcoran, R., Howard, R., Blackwood, N., and Kinderman, P. (2001). Persecutory delusions: a review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 21(8), 1143-1192
• Brummett, B. H., Maynard, K. E, Babyak, M. A., Haney, T. L., Siegler, I. C., Helms, M. J., and Barefoot, J. C. (1998). Measures of hostility as príictor of úcial affect during social interaction: evidence for construct validity. Annals of Behavioral Míicine, 20(3), 168-173.
• Combs, D. R., Penn, D. L., Wicher, M., and Waldheter, E. (2007). The Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ): a new measure for evaluating hostile social-cognitive biases in paranoia. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 12(2), 128-143.
• Fenigstein, A. (1997). Paranoid thought and schematic processing. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 16(1), 77-94
• Freeman, D. (2007). Suspicious minds: the psychology of persecutory delusions. Clinical Psychological Review, 27(4), 425-467.
• Garety, P. A., and Freeman, D. (1999). Cognitive approaches to delusions: a critical review of theories and evidence. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 38(2), 113-154.
• Green, M. F., and Horan, W. P. (2010). Social cognition in schizophrenia. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(4), 243-248.
• Izard, C. (1994). Innate and universal úcial expressions: evidence for development and cross-cultural research. Psychological Bulletin, 115(2), 288-299
• Kinderman, P., and Bentall, R. P. (1996). A new measure of causal locus: the internal, personal and situational attributions questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 20(2), 261-264.
• Kohler, C. G., Turner, T. H., Bilker, W. B., Brensinger, C., Siegel, S. J., Kanes, S. J.,… and Gur, R. C. (2003). Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: intensity effects and error pattern. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(10), 1768-1774.
• Marwick, K., and Hall, J. (2008). Social cognition in schizophrenia: a review of úce processing. British Míical Bulletin, 88(1), 43-58.
• Penn, D. L., Sanna, L. J., and Roberts, D. L. (2008). Social Cognition in schizophrenia: an overview. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 34(3), 408-411
• Peterson, C., Semmel, A., Von Baeyer, C., Abramsom, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., and Seligman, M. E. P. (1982). The attributional style questionnaire. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 6(3), 287-299

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Estilo atribucional en esquizofrenia