Xiao-yan Cao

Experience of Pleasure and Emotional Expression in Individuals with Schizotypal Personality Features

Difficulties in feeling pleasure and expressing emotions are one of the key features of schizophrenia spectrum conditions, and are significant contributors to constricted interpersonal interactions. The current study examined the experience of pleasure and emotional expression in college students who demonstrated high and low levels of schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) traits on self-report questionnaires. One hundred and seventeen subjects with SPD traits and 116 comparison controls were recruited to participate. Cluster analyses conducted in the SPD group identified negative SPD and positive SPD subgroups. The negative SPD group exhibited deficient emotional expression and anticipatory pleasure, but showed intact consummatory pleasure. The positive SPD group reported significantly greater levels of anticipatory, consummatory and total pleasure compared to the control group. Both SPD groups reported significantly more problems in everyday memory and greater levels of depressive and anxiety-related symptoms.

Coping flexibility in college students with depressive symptoms

BackgroundThe current study explored the prevalence of depressed mood among Chinese undergraduate students and examined the coping patterns and degree of flexibility of flexibility of such patterns associated with such mood.MethodsA set of questionnaire assessing coping patterns, coping flexibility, and depressive symptoms were administered to 428 students (234 men and 194 women).ResultsA total of 266 participants both completed the entire set of questionnaires and reported a frequency of two or more stressful life events (the criterion needed to calculate variance in perceived controllability). Findings showed that higher levels of depressive symptoms were significantly associated with higher levels of both event frequency (r = .368, p < .001) and event impact (r = .245, p < .001) and lower levels of perceived controllability (r = -.261, p < .001), coping effectiveness (r = -.375, p < .001), and ratio of strategy to situation fit (r = -.108, p < .05). Depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with cognitive flexibility (variance of perceived controllability; r = .031, p = .527), Gender was not a significant moderator of any of the reported associations.ConclusionsFindings indicate that Chinese university students with depressive symptoms reported experiencing a greater number of negative events than did non-depressed university students. In addition, undergraduates with depressive symptoms were more likely than other undergraduates to utilize maladaptive coping methods. Such findings highlight the potential importance of interventions aimed at helping undergraduate students with a lower coping flexibility develop skills to cope with stressful life events.

Coping flexibility in young adults: comparison between subjects with and without schizotypal personality features.

The current study examined characteristics of coping patterns adopted by college students in mainland China. In particular, it examined the coping strategies adopted by subjects with schizotypal personality (SPD) features compared to those without SPD features, and compared the relative effectiveness of their coping. Four types of coping flexibility were identified among the college sample (n=427), including active-inflexible, passive-inflexible, active-inconsistent, and passive-inconsistent styles. The passive-inconsistent style was related to the worst outcomes. When comparing subjects with SPD features with those without SPD features, subjects with SPD features endorsed significantly more emotion-focused strategies in uncontrollable situations than those without SPD features. The SPD group experienced higher levels of trait anxiety, depression, paranoid ideation and general health problems. The SPD group also generally perceived more, less controllable stress than the non-SPD group and randomly used all four categories of coping strategies.

Executive control in schizophrenia in task involving semantic inhibition and working memory

Executive dysfunctions have been consistently demonstrated in patients with schizophrenia. This study aimed to investigate deficits in specific executive functioning components, namely working memory and inhibition, in schizophrenia. In study 1, a set of neurocognitive function tests was administered to 41 patients with schizophrenia and 25 healthy controls to capture specific components of executive functioning, including semantic inhibition (the Stroop-like paradigm and the Chinese Version of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test (HSC)), working memory (the spatial n-back), and response inhibition (the stop signal task (SST)). Results showed that schizophrenia patients did significantly worse than controls under both working memory and inhibition demands in the Stroop-like paradigm. In particular, patients were impaired when inhibiting a semantically associated response; and performance was correlated with negative symptoms. In study 2, we employed a modified semantic inhibitory error monitoring paradigm to examine whether patients with schizophrenia (n=11) were impaired in semantic inhibitory error monitoring or not as compared to 11 healthy controls. The results suggested that patients with schizophrenia in this study remained intact in semantic inhibition error monitoring. There was no difference in the semantic inhibitory monitoring performance between healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia. Taken together, these results suggested impaired working memory context maintenance and semantic inhibition in schizophrenia patients, and these impairments were related to clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

Neurological abnormalities and neurocognitive functions in healthy elder people: a structural equation modeling analysis.

Background/AimsNeurological abnormalities have been reported in normal aging population. However, most of them were limited to extrapyramidal signs and soft signs such as motor coordination and sensory integration have received much less attention. Very little is known about the relationship between neurological soft signs and neurocognitive function in healthy elder people. The current study aimed to examine the underlying relationships between neurological soft signs and neurocognition in a group of healthy elderly.MethodsOne hundred and eighty healthy elderly participated in the current study. Neurological soft signs were evaluated with the subscales of Cambridge Neurological Inventory. A set of neurocognitive tests was also administered to all the participants. Structural equation modeling was adopted to examine the underlying relationship between neurological soft signs and neurocognition.ResultsNo significant differences were found between the male and female elder people in neurocognitive function performances and neurological soft signs. The model fitted well in the elderly and indicated the moderate associations between neurological soft signs and neurocognition, specifically verbal memory, visual memory and working memory.ConclusionsThe neurological soft signs are more or less statistically equivalent to capture the similar information done by conventional neurocognitive function tests in the elderly. The implication of these findings may serve as a potential neurological marker for the early detection of pathological aging diseases or related mental status such as mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers disease.

The relation between prospective memory and working memory: Evidence from event-related potential data

Event-related potentials were used in this study to investigate the neural correlates of prospective memory and whether working memory is involved in prospective remembering. Thirty undergraduate or graduate students participated in the study. All participants completed a working memory test, namely, the Chinese Letter-Number Span Test, and were divided into two groups: the longer and shorter working memory span groups. They also undertook a prospective memory task while electrophysiological data were recorded. The results showed that participants in the longer working memory span group had shorter reaction times and smaller amplitudes in prospective positivity than participants in the shorter working memory span group. The results suggested that working memory resources are involved in the intention retrieval process of prospective remembering.

The nature and extent of working memory dysfunction in schizophrenia

This study aimed to examine verbal and visual-spatial working memory (WM) dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia. We compared 60 patients with schizophrenia with 57 healthy controls (matched for age, educational level, and IQ) on three WM tasks. Patients with schizophrenia performed significantly more poorly than healthy controls on verbal, visual, and spatial WM tests. Moreover, WM deficits were inversely associated with both the positive and negative symptoms of the patients. Taken together, these findings suggest that there are pervasive WM impairments in patients with schizophrenia. In addition, clinical features may play a significant role in the expression of WM deficits.

A preliminary study of memory functions in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a neuropsychiatric disorder with etiologies caused by both genetic and environmental factors. However, very few studies have been done to examine the differential pattern of working memory dysfunction in individuals at risk for schizophrenia. The current study aimed to examine the different modalities of working memory performances in the first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia. Results showed that unaffected first-degree relatives characterized by high but not low schizotypal traits demonstrated significantly poorer performances in the verbal 2-back tasks, the immediate and delayed recall of logical memory compared to healthy controls. These preliminary findings suggest memory function impairment was more closely associated with schizotypal traits in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients.