The Effect of Social Influence on Effort-Cost Decision-Making in Schizophrenia: From Mechanisms to Real-World Associations

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ ABSTRACT Deficits in motivated behavior and effort-cost decision-making (ECDM) are core to schizophrenia and related disorders (SZ). ECDM paradigms show that SZ are less likely to use contextual information (e.g., reward magnitude and probability) to drive decisions about whether to exert high effort for rewards. As such, they are less likely to expend effort in situations when it would benefit them the most to do so. These motivational deficits have been closely linked to functional outcomes and their treatment remains ineffective, highlighting the need to examine factors that could enhance ECDM in SZ. Social influence (e.g., the presence of information about peer decisions) has been shown to drive ECDM in healthy individuals (HC), particularly in conditions of low reward or probability (when the other contextual factors may be less likely to independently do so). While there is very little literature examining the role of social influence on effort in SZ, there is some evidence that SZ may increase effort expenditure in response to social encouragement and that (unlike in HC) this may particularly be the case in conditions of high reward magnitude. Thus, social factors could enhance ECDM in SZ by increasing effort in the conditions in which it would be most beneficial to do so-- conditions in which SZ demonstrate the most impairments. Consistent with behavioral findings that SZ are less likely to use reward-related information to inform effortful decisions, they also may show reduced reward-related modulation in neural regions associated with effective ECDM: ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. Interestingly, these regions overlap with those involved in response to peer information and social reward, raising the possibility that social information may modulate decisions about effort in SZ by activating neural systems that play a role in effective ECDM. Further, to understand whether and for whom these laboratory-based neural and behavioral markers of social influence on ECDM might lead to functional benefit in SZ, it is critical to examine how they relate to individual differences in real-world reports of social motivation. Thus, this proposal seeks to use a multimethod framework (e.g., behavioral task, fMRI, EMA) to examine whether social information modulates decisions about effort expenditure in SZ as it does in HC, the neural bases of these decisions, and real-world individual differences in social motivation that are associated with this relationship. Results from the proposed study could elucidate the nature of social and motivational impairments in SZ and inform intervention efforts to ameliorate these impairing deficits. The realization of this project will allow the applicant to receive training in: 1) neuroimaging techniques and analysis, 2) the link between social processes and motivated behavior in SZ, 3) EMA design, collection and analysis, 4) research rigor and reproducibility, and 5) professional development. This project will help the candidate accomplish her goal of becoming an independent principal investigator that uses multimodal approaches to investigate the mechanisms and real-world correlates of social and motivational impairments in SZ.