Cognitive Training for Emotion Regulation in Psychotic Disorders

Psychotic disorders are serious and debilitating mental illnesses that incur substantial suffering for patients and present major challenges to our health care system. Difficulties with emotion regulation (i.e., the ability to control the emotion response using strategies) significantly predict the development and maintenance of psychotic symptoms and poor community-based functional outcomes. Recent neuroimaging research indicates that hypofrontality may underlie these deficits. Unfortunately, there is no accepted technique for remediating these emotion regulation abnormalities in psychotic disorders. Recent advances from the field of cognitive neuroscience provide hope for a resolution to this critical unmet need in psychotic disorder therapeutics, demonstrating that brief computerized cognitive training interventions are capable of improving emotion regulation ability by targeting neural activation in the prefrontal cortex. The goal of the proposed project is to determine whether an emotional working memory cognitive training program is effective for remediating emotion regulation abnormalities and associated clinical outcomes in people with psychotic disorders. Outpatients with psychotic disorders will be randomly assigned to either an emotional working memory training (n = 35) or placebo (P: n = 35) cognitive training control intervention delivered via an app on a smart phone for 30 days. The primary aim is to determine whether the emotional working memory intervention successfully engages the target mechanism and enhances prefrontal activation on a non-trained emotion regulation transfer task beyond a pre-specified effect size criterion. Results will also be used to determine the treatment duration (15 vs. 30 days) that most effectively and efficiently improves the target.

Inclusion criteria

• diagnostic and statistical manual fifth edition diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder
• 18-60 years old
• speaks English
• premorbid intelligence quotient > 70
• clinically stable as indicated by no antipsychotic medication changes in the last month or if on depot, no change in the past 2 months.

Exclusion criteria

• history of intellectual disability or neurological disorder
• history of traumatic brain injury with loss of consciousness > 10 minutes or behavioral sequelae
• substance use disorder within the last 6 months (other than nicotine)
• 4) endorsement of MRI exclusion factors