Psychosocial treatments for negative symptoms in schizophrenia: current practices and future directions.

Schizophrenia can be a chronic and debilitating psychiatric disorder. Though advancements have been made in the psychosocial treatment of some symptoms of schizophrenia, people with schizophrenia often continue to experience some level of symptoms, particularly negative symptoms, throughout their lives. Because negative symptoms are associated with poor functioning and quality of life, the treatment of negative symptoms is a high priority for intervention development. However, current psychosocial treatments primarily focus on the reduction of positive symptoms with comparatively few studies investigating the efficacy of psychosocial treatments for negative symptoms. In this article, we review and evaluate the existing literature on three categories of psychosocial treatments--cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), social skills training (SST), and combined treatment interventions--and their impact on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Of the interventions reviewed, CBT and SST appear to have the most empirical support, with some evidence suggesting that CBT is associated with maintenance of negative symptom improvement beyond six months after treatment. It remains unclear if a combined treatment approach provides improvements above and beyond those associated with each individual treatment modality. Although psychosocial treatments show promise for the treatment of negative symptoms, there are many unanswered questions about how best to intervene. We conclude with a general discussion of these unanswered questions, future directions and methodological considerations, and suggestions for the further development of negative symptom interventions

Anticipating Social Pleasure with Family, Friends, and New People: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications for Personality and Psychopathology

Individual differences in anticipatory pleasure have been studied primarily in physical or sensory domains, such as anticipating eating tasty food or the anticipating the excitement of riding a rollercoaster. The present studies were designed to extend this research to the social domain. We propose that, just as in nonsocial domains, people in social situations will orient and move toward those experiences they expect and predict will be pleasurable for them. Current self-report measures of social pleasure or its absence (i.e., anhedonia) tend to assess consummatory (in-the-moment) pleasure across one global, social domain. The current studies sought to define and assess individual differences that distinguish anticipatory pleasure in different kinds of social relationships. Conceptual, item-analytic, and factor-analytic work provided consistent evidence that self-reports of social pleasure anticipation can be distinguished across three relationship domains: Friends, Family, and New People. The Social Pleasure Anticipation (SPA) scales showed internal consistency and retest reliability, convergent and discriminant validity evidence when related to measures of social and nonsocial pleasure and to measures of personality and social functioning, as well as external validity based on peer reports. The SPA scales differentially predicted unique and replicated patterns of personality traits, psychological symptoms, and well-being. Discussion focuses on the implications of this tripartite taxonomy of the social domain for theories and measures of social functioning that so far have been conceptualized only at the global, undifferentiated level

Psychosocial treatments for negative symptoms in schizophrenia: current practices and future directions.

Schizophrenia can be a chronic and debilitating psychiatric disorder. Though advancements have been made in the psychosocial treatment of some symptoms of schizophrenia, people with schizophrenia often continue to experience some level of symptoms, particularly negative symptoms, throughout their lives. Because negative symptoms are associated with poor functioning and quality of life, the treatment of negative symptoms is a high priority for intervention development. However, current psychosocial treatments primarily focus on the reduction of positive symptoms with comparatively few studies investigating the efficacy of psychosocial treatments for negative symptoms. In this article, we review and evaluate the existing literature on three categories of psychosocial treatments--cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), social skills training (SST), and combined treatment interventions--and their impact on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Of the interventions reviewed, CBT and SST appear to have the most empirical support, with some evidence suggesting that CBT is associated with maintenance of negative symptom improvement beyond six months after treatment. It remains unclear if a combined treatment approach provides improvements above and beyond those associated with each individual treatment modality. Although psychosocial treatments show promise for the treatment of negative symptoms, there are many unanswered questions about how best to intervene. We conclude with a general discussion of these unanswered questions, future directions and methodological considerations, and suggestions for the further development of negative symptom interventions

The structural invariance of the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale across time and culture

The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS) is a self-report instrument that assesses pleasure experience. Initial scale development and validation in the United States yielded a two-factor solution comprising anticipatory and consummatory pleasure. However, a four-factor model that further parsed anticipatory and consummatory pleasure experience into abstract and contextual components was a better model fit in China. In this study, we tested both models using confirmatory factor analysis in an American and a Chinese sample and examined the configural measurement invariance of both models across culture. We also examined the temporal stability of the four-factor model in the Chinese sample. The results indicated that the four-factor model of the TEPS was a better fit than the two-factor model in the Chinese sample. In contrast, both models fit the American sample, which also included many Asian American participants. The four-factor model fit both the Asian American and Chinese samples equally well. Finally, the four-factor model demonstrated good measurement and structural invariance across culture and time, suggesting that this model may be applicable in both cross-cultural and longitudinal studies.</p