S121. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS, SOCIAL COGNITION AND METACOGNITION IN PEOPLE WITH A RECENT-ONSET OF PSYCHOSIS

Abstract

BackgroundThe reasoning bias of jumping to conclusions (JTC) consists of a tendency to have an impaired decision process in which assumptions are made having little information. JTC is one of the most widely studied cognitive biases in psychosis (Freeman, 2007; Garety and Freeman, 1999; Moritz and Woodward, 2005) due to its higher prevalence in people with psychosis in comparison to healthy participants as found by So et al. (2016) in her meta-analyses and by Dudley et al. (2016) in his systematic review and meta-analysis. Social cognition(sc) is the best defined as a set of neurocognitive processes related to understanding, recognizing, processing, and appropriately using social stimuli in one′s environment (Adolphs, 1999). The domains are: emotion processing, theory of mind, attributional style and social perception.MethodsOne hundred and twenty patients with a recent onset of a psychotic disorder were assessed. Jumping to conclusions (JTC) was assessed with the beads task in which the subject must take a decision regarding the probability of the extracted bead belonging to one of two jars. In task 1 a jar is presented with a ratio of 85% black beads and 15% orange beats and another jar with inverse proportion. Task 2 is the same but the probability is 60%-40%. Task 3 has the same probability 60%-40& but instead of beads, the jars contain negative and positive adjectives. JTC was considered as taking a decision after extracting one or two beads (Brett-Jones et al. 1987). A battery of questionnaires regarding social cognition was included: The Hinting Task, was used to assess ToM. (Corcoran et al. 1995; Gil et al. 2012); Emotional perception was assessed with the Emotional Recognition Test Faces (Baron-Cohen et al. 1997), and the attributional style was assessed with the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ; Kinderman & Bentall, 1996). Irrational beliefs were assessed with the irrational Belief Test (TCI; Calvete & Cardeñoso, 2001). The scale is composed of ten subscales: needing acceptance from others, high expectations, guilt, intolerance to frustration, worry and anxiety, emotional irresponsibility, avoidance of problems, dependence, helplessness, and perfectionism.ResultsPatients who performed JTC in Task 1 scored higher levels of worry and anxiety (p=0.026), perfectionism (p=0.01) and internal attribution for negative events (p=0.034) and lower in externalizing bias (p=0.042) and emotional recognition (p=0.042). Patients who performed JTC in Task 2 scored higher levels of worry and anxiety (p=0.016) and lower in emotional recognition (p=0.031). And finally, patients who performed JTC in Task 3 scored higher in internal attribution for negative events (p=0.029) and worry and anxiety (p=0.002) whereas that lower in situational attribution for negative events (p=0.004) and emotional recognition (p=0.017). ToM is not related with any of the JTC tasks.DiscussionJTC is related to some aspects of social cognition, specifically with attributional style and emotional recognition. Moreover, JTC is related with perfectionism and worry and anxiety irrational beliefs.