Congratulations Anna Benedict on successfully defending her Master’s Thesis!
Congratulations to graduate student Anna Benedict for successfully defending her master’s thesis project. Learn more about Anna’s thesis below:
For people living with a long-term psychotic illness like schizophrenia, we know that their motivation and their deeply-held core beliefs matter for their functioning—their abilities to live independently, fulfill meaningful roles, and maintain interpersonal relationships. However, in the early stages of a psychotic illness, precursors to later symptoms are dynamic and changing. A person’s motivation to engage with the world may buffer or heighten the effect of negative core beliefs on their functioning; conversely, one’s core beliefs may impact how their motivation is directed, resulting in various functional outcomes. Importantly, we do not understand how motivational processes or core beliefs develop and interact with each other, or how these factors impact people’s functioning, across these early illness stages. This is crucial because identifying and acting upon intervention targets in these early stages can have an outsized positive impact on people’s real-world functioning and well-being as their illness develops.
In a sample of 145 young adults from the community—who had either experienced a first episode of psychosis (FEP), were at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR), or were healthy controls (HC)—we assessed people’s core beliefs about themselves (e.g., I am worthless, I am interesting) and about other people (e.g., others are hostile, others are supportive). We also assessed two types of motivational processes: behavioral drive, a form of “lower-order” motivation comprised of moment-to-moment experiences; and narrative agency, a form of “higher order” motivation constituting a person’s narrative identity as a protagonist who acts with mastery in their own life. Lastly, we assessed people’s functioning in their social and role domains of life.
We found two interesting things. First, core beliefs about the self and others matter over and above diagnostic group, with similar impacts on real-world functioning for people across HC, CHR, and FEP groups. This means that just knowing someone’s diagnostic group is not enough in predicting their functioning: it is also crucial to know what they believe deeply about themselves and other people. Second, while neither form of motivation seemed to matter for functioning across groups past the effects of illness stage, both types of motivation were uniquely important for people in the FEP group. For people in the FEP group specifically, narrative agency correlated with functioning, and those with very low behavioral drive experienced the worst functional outcomes. This means that for people who have recently experienced the onset of a psychotic disorder, both lower-order and higher-order motivational processes are particularly important in how they can function in their day-to-day lives.
Taken together, this study emphasizes the importance of targeting core beliefs in psychotherapy and other interventions, oriented towards building self-esteem and positive interpersonal relationships, for people in the early stages of psychosis. This study also suggests that for people specifically in the FEP stage of illness, both narrative agency and behavioral drive may be important intervention targets to assist their functional recovery.
