大隅 尚広

AIMS: Personal agency is a variable which potentially facilitates personal recovery in people with serious mental illness. This study aimed to develop a new brief measure for subjective personal agency that can be completed by people with serious mental illness. METHODS: Two focus group interviews were first conducted with 11 people with schizophrenia to understand the fundamental components of subjective personal agency for people with serious mental illness living in the community. One group comprised six people with schizophrenia living in the community, while the other consisted of five people with schizophrenia working as peer-support workers. We then developed scale items through collaboration with people with schizophrenia and qualitative analysis (stage 1). A cross-sectional survey was then conducted to test the psychometric properties of the new scale among service users with schizophrenia in 18 assertive community treatment teams (stage 2). Factor validity was tested via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). We evaluated convergent validity with the Boston University Empowerment Scale (BUES), divergent validity with the global assessment of functioning (GAF), internal consistency, and test-retest reliability. RESULTS: Seven items were included in the scale at stage 1. In stage 2, 195 participants completed this scale. EFA revealed a one-factor model with five items. CFA indicated good model fit (χ2 statistics [CMIN] = 8.445, df = 5 (CMIN/df = 1.689), p = 0.133, comparative fit index = 0.974, Tucker-Lewis fit index = 0.949, root mean square error of approximation = 0.077 and standardised root mean squared residual = 0.042). The new scale was significantly correlated with total BUES score (r = 0.526, p < 0.001), but not with GAF score. Cronbach's α for internal consistency was 0.79, and intra-class correlation coefficient for test-retest reliability was 0.70. CONCLUSION: We developed a new, five-item Subjective Personal Agency scale (SPA-5) that can be completed by people with serious mental illness. Further studies are needed to confirm the results outside Japan.

Psychopathy is a group of personality traits that are associated with violations of social norms. Previous studies have suggested that people with psychopathic traits in subclinical populations do not necessarily display antisocial, self-defeating behaviors, and instead may strategically show adaptive behaviors in response to cues during reciprocal social interactions. Therefore, in the present study, we examined whether the association between psychopathic traits and unfair behavior can be moderated by a potential for punishment and social distance (anonymity), which are known to facilitate fair behavior. We focused on two psychopathic traits: primary and secondary psychopathy. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness, shallow affect, manipulation, and superficial charm. In contrast, secondary psychopathy is associated with impulsivity and lack of long-term goals, and is related to hostile behavior. A total of 348 undergraduate students determined the amounts of money that they would offer to strangers or friends at their university in hypothetical scenarios of the ultimatum game (UG) and the dictator game (DG). While gender affected decisions in the hypothetical scenarios of the DG, it did not interact with psychopathic traits. The score for primary psychopathy on the Levenson self-report psychopathy scale predicted unfair monetary offers to strangers in the DG, where participants could not be punished. However, compared with their offers in the DG, individuals with higher scores for primary psychopathy made larger offers in the UG, where low offers could trigger punishment from the recipient. Moreover, primary psychopathy did not decrease the amounts of offers in either game when the participant considered the recipient to be a friend. On the other hand, secondary psychopathy was not associated with differences in behavioral fairness depending on a potential for punishment or social distance. Based on these findings, we discuss strategic social skills as a function of primary psychopathy.

Although a number of studies have investigated the incongruity-detection and resolution process in humor comprehension, it is difficult to functionally and anatomically dissociate these processes. We used event-related potentials (ERP) and standardized low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography analysis (sLORETA) to examine the time course and localization of brain activity during incongruity detection and resolution. We used the same materials as in our previous fMRI study. Eighteen participants read funny and unfunny scenarios and judged whether the target sentence was funny or not. Results indicated that ERPs elicited by a funny punch line showed a P2 component followed by a P600 component over the centro-parietal electrode sites. Our sLORETA analysis of the P2 ERPs revealed a stronger activation for the funny vs. unfunny condition in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). For the P600 ERPs, the funny punch line elicited greater activation in the temporal-parietal regions. These results indicate that incongruity-detection processes activate the SFG and mPFC in the P2 time window, while incongruity-resolution processes generate activation at the temporal-parietal regions in the P600 time window. These results provide the evidence that verbal humor comprehension is processed in steps which start with the incongruity detection in the early P2 time window and followed by a P600 component reflecting incongruity resolution. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.