Alterations in Emotional Diversity Correspond With Increased Severity of Attenuated Positive and Negative Symptoms in the Clinical High-Risk Syndrome

Background: Alterations in emotional functioning are a key feature of psychosis and are present in individuals with a clinical high-risk (CHR) syndrome. However, little is known about alterations in emotional diversity (i.e., the variety and relative abundance of emotions that humans experience) and clinical correlates in this population.Methods: Individuals meeting criteria for a CHR syndrome (N = 47) and matched healthy controls (HC) (N = 58) completed the modified Differential Emotions Scale (used to derive scores of total, positive, and negative emotional diversity) and clinical interviews (i.e., Structured Interview for Psychosis-Risk Syndromes).Results: Findings showed that the CHR group experienced lower levels of positive emotional diversity compared to HCs. Among the CHR individuals, lower levels of positive and higher levels of negative emotional diversity were associated with more severe attenuated positive and negative symptoms. Analyses controlled for mean levels of emotion and current antipsychotic medication use.Discussion: Results demonstrate that altered emotional diversity (in particular lower levels of positive and higher levels of negative emotional diversity) is a clinically relevant marker in CHR individuals, above and beyond alterations in mean levels of emotional experiences. Future studies may probe sources, downstream consequences, and potential modifiability of decreased emotional diversity in individuals at CHR.

Natural Language Processing markers in first episode psychosis and people at clinical high-risk

Recent work has suggested that disorganised speech might be a powerful predictor of later psychotic illness in clinical high risk subjects. To that end, several automated measures to quantify disorganisation of transcribed speech have been proposed. However, it remains unclear which measures are most strongly associated with psychosis, how different measures are related to each other and what the best strategies are to collect speech data from participants. Here, we assessed whether twelve automated Natural Language Processing markers could differentiate transcribed speech excerpts from subjects at clinical high risk for psychosis, first episode psychosis patients and healthy control subjects (total N = 54). In-line with previous work, several measures showed significant differences between groups, including semantic coherence, speech graph connectivity and a measure of whether speech was on-topic, the latter of which outperformed the related measure of tangentiality. Most NLP measures examined were only weakly related to each other, suggesting they provide complementary information. Finally, we compared the ability of transcribed speech generated using different tasks to differentiate the groups. Speech generated from picture descriptions of the Thematic Apperception Test and a story re-telling task outperformed free speech, suggesting that choice of speech generation method may be an important consideration. Overall, quantitative speech markers represent a promising direction for future clinical applications.