Rebecca Kazinka
Department of Psychiatry
University of Minnesota Medical School
A Computational Model of Spite Sensitivity to Understand Persecutory Ideation
Abstract: Persecutory ideation is a common experience in psychosis, yet also presents in other neuropsychiatric disorders and even in the general population. However, our understanding of the neural mechanism of persecutory ideation is relatively unclear. My work focuses on building a construct strongly related to persecutory ideation to better understand the associated neural processes that drive decisions. In this talk, I will present our findings showing that spite sensitivity, i.e., a worry that another person will intentionally incur a loss to ensure that you do as well, provides a model for understand persecutory ideation. We built a computational model of spite sensitivity using an economic game called the Minnesota Trust Game (MTG), which is a modified version of the trust game with two conditions in which the partner is either incentivized or disincentivized to behave fairly. Through several studies in undergraduates, individuals with psychosis, and monozygotic twins, we show that spite sensitivity predicts persecutory ideation and is associated with activation in the lateral OFC. This model provides a means of quantifying persecutory ideation and may be useful for future
clinical applications.