Examining the Role of Failure and Success Experiences on Task Persistence and Neurocognition in Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders

ABSTRACT

Background

Recent theoretical models suggest that a variety of psychological and contextual factors account for a significant proportion of the observed neurocognitive impairment in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD). Numerous non-neurocognitive mechanisms of neurocognitive functioning have been proposed that warrant investigation; however, few studies have empirically examined these factors. This cross-over study examined whether the experience of failure or success affects task persistence and neurocognition differentially between individuals with SSD and healthy controls.

Methods

Twenty-nine participants with SSD and 30 healthy controls (M_age = 29.33, SD = 10.72) completed success and failure inductions, psychological questionnaires, an anagram persistence task, and brief neurocognitive testing remotely at two time-points.

Results

Both groups demonstrated significantly lower persistence and worse decision-making skills in the failure condition relative to the success condition. Individuals with SSD demonstrated slower processing speed, but this was not affected by prior failure or success.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that the experience of failure is similarly detrimental to persistence and decision-making in healthy controls and individuals with SSD but does not contribute to processing speed performance. This suggests that higher-order executive functions are more susceptible to manipulation by contextual factors compared to lower-order cognitive functions.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychosis
• decision-making
• anagram persistence
• contextual factors
• remote assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13803395.2023.2227406

Declarations

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Connaught Fund.