SimpSoCoS · Social exclusion as an acute psychosocial stressor in schizophrenia: impact on pathophysiology and social cognition
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-03-01 → 2025-07-31
- EU contribution
- €259,399
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Social exclusion as an acute psychosocial stressor in schizophrenia: impact on pathophysiology and social cognition
Schizophrenia (SZ), one of the most stigmatised mental health conditions, deeply affects a person’s self-esteem, relationships, and overall quality of life. It often disrupts social connections, employment, and independence. This project focuses on social cognition (SC)—the mental processes that help us understand and connect with others. Two key abilities are emotion recognition (the capacity to read, understand and regulate emotions) and Theory of Mind (the ability to imagine what others might think or feel). Difficulties in SC often appear before other symptoms of SZ and can explain many of the challenges people with a DxoSZ face. However, SC difficulties can also occur in people without a psychiatric diagnosis. Understanding how everyday social stress shapes these processes could lead to more supportive interventions. People with SZ often find it harder to adapt to sudden stressful situations, reporting stronger feelings of fear. They also show higher heart activity and cortisol levels at rest, reflecting the long-term impact of chronic stress. Prolonged exposure to stress can affect almost every system in the body, increasing vulnerability to mental, cardiovascular, and metabolic conditions. Acute stress, a threat to well-being, elicits different bodily and mental processes, mobilise energy and promote flexible responses to changing contexts. The brain areas involved in managing stress are closely linked to those that mediate SC. Thus, the main goal of this project is to better understand how responses to social stress influence the way people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (DxoSZ) process social information. To explore this, I compared responses from people with and without a DxoSZ before and after an experimental situation of social exclusion designed to feel realistic and serve as a meaningful psychosocial stressor.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The main goal of SimpSoCoS is to explore how personal reactivity to social stress impacts on the pathophysiology of social cognition (SC) in schizophrenia (SZ). The drive: to open avenues for novel therapies by reducing the knowledge gap among the social context, the biological damage and the SZ clinical expression. SZ is a severe, highly stigmatised mental disorder conferring a vast economic burden. In Europe, the incidence of SZ is 15/100,000 persons and the morbidity risk, 7/1000. SC allows people to understand the social world. Thus, deficits in SC deeply limit functional recovery within SZ patients, causing severe socio-occupational disability. Yet, treatment efficacy on SC functioning is modest and a broad understanding of how daily life events influence SC dysfunction is missing. Stress evokes integrated physiological and behavioural adjustments in a changing environment. The autonomic nervous system and a neuroendocrine axis are the primary effector systems during stress responses. Within key stress regulatory brain circuits, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) integrates and regulates physiological and behavioural stress responses and is a candidate modulator of social functioning. Its activation may be impaired in SZ. This project will address these challenges by connecting an interdisciplinary team combining stress integrative biology, clinical psychiatry research and neurophysiology. Based on a novel paradigm representative of real-life social exclusion situations for people with SZ, we propose a case-control evaluation of: a) SC performance before and after the stressor; b) subjective appraisal of the social stressor; c) cardiovascular and cortisol stress reactivity; d) the effect of mPFC activation by transcranial magnetic stimulation on the abovementioned endpoints in SZ patients. The interdisciplinary skills gained during this action will significantly enhance applicant’s future career prospects on bringing basic neuroscience closer to patient care.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD DE ALCALA · Alcala De Henares/MadridCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union