Abstract
This study reports experimental results from a clinical sample of patients with a cocaine-related disorder and dual diagnosis: Schizophrenia and Anti-Social Personality Disorder. Both types of patients as well as a non-clinical group of students performed two incentivized decision-making tasks. In the first part of the experiment, they performed a lottery-choice task in order to elicit their degree of risk aversion. In the second part, they decided in two modified dictator games aimed at eliciting their aversion to advantageous and disadvantageous inequality. It is found that the Anti-Social Personality Disorder group exhibits no significant differences from the non-clinical sample in either task. However, compared with the students’ sample, subjects from the group with schizophrenia show more risk aversion and exhibit more aversion towards disadvantageous inequality.
Highlights
Cocaine is the most commonly used illicit stimulant drug in Europe
This paper focuses on the differences between, on one hand, a non-clinical sample and, on the other hand, two clinical samples involving cocaine abuse patients: one with schizophrenia and the other with ASPD comorbidities
220 undergraduate students participated in the experimental sessions run in the Laboratorio de Economía Experimental (LEE) of the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón (Spain)
Summary
Cocaine is the most commonly used illicit stimulant drug in Europe. It is estimated that about 2.3 million young adults aged from 15 to 34 (1.9% of this age group in the general population) consumed cocaine during 20171. Two of the most prevalent comorbid (dual pathology) mental disorders in cocaine abusers are schizophrenia and Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD, )[2,3]. The experimental paradigm of decision-making processes in mental disorders such as addiction, psychopathy and schizophrenia[4] has proved to be useful in the design of psychosocial treatments in patients with dual pathology. As5 states, when subjects with different personality disorders face decision-making problems, they are strongly affected by concerns related to past experiences. This paper focuses on the differences between, on one hand, a non-clinical sample and, on the other hand, two clinical samples involving cocaine abuse patients: one with schizophrenia and the other with ASPD comorbidities. Comparisons across the controls and the clinical samples are made to identify behavioral differences in the domains of risk and inequality aversion. Inequality aversion is a decision maker’s preference for egalitarian distributions of wealth as opposed to having more or less than others (advantageous and disadvantageous inequality aversion, respectively, as defined by[6])
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