Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Llerena, Katiah

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    THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR EMOTIONAL MAINTENANCE AND REDUCED GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOR IN SCHIZOPHRENIA
    (2014) Llerena, Katiah; Blanchard, Jack J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The current study investigated the neurophysiological underpinnings of emotional maintenance in schizophrenia (SCZ) and whether aberrant neural responses predicted deficits in affective decision making and real-world motivated behavior. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 27 SCZ outpatients and 23 healthy controls (CN) during an emotional maintenance task in which participants were presented an initial image for 3 seconds and then required to maintain a mental representation of the intensity that image over a delay period of varying lengths and determine whether the initial image was more or less intense than the second image. The Late Positive Potential (LPP) was used as a neurophysiological marker of emotional maintenance during the delay period. SCZ showed normal in-the-moment emotion experience to positive stimuli; however, SCZ rated negative and neutral pictures as more intense than CN. SCZ also displayed deficits in emotional maintenance accuracy. Furthermore, ERP data indicated reduced LPP amplitude during picture viewing for SCZ compared to CN, and only CN showed persistence of the LPP for positive stimuli into the offset delay period for approximately 1 second and this was significantly associated with behavioral emotional maintenance performance. Behavioral emotional maintenance performance also significantly predicted clinically rated negative symptoms (motivation and pleasure) and poor functional outcome. Thus, impairments in emotional maintenance may offer a promising new theory as to why people with SCZ fail to pursue goal-directed activities.
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    The Social Behaviors and Emotional Characteristics of Individuals Elevated on Social Anhedonia
    (2010) Llerena, Katiah; Blanchard, Jack J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Research suggests that social anhedonia (SocAnh) is a promising indicator for the vulnerability towards developing schizophrenia-spectrum disorders as well as an important determinant of the social impairment associated within these disorders. In this study we sought to examine the hypothesis that, within social affiliative interactions, individuals with SocAnh demonstrate problematic behavioral skills and experiential deficits. The current study compared controls (n=54) to individuals elevated on SocAnh (n=42) within a videotaped social interaction focusing on an initial affiliative interaction. Compared to controls, participants with SocAnh were rated as less behaviorally affiliative and they were rated as having overall lower social skills. There were no group differences on ratings of facial affect. SocAnh participants reported experiencing less positive affect in response to the social interaction, were less willing to engage in future social interactions with their interaction partner, and had less affiliative reactions toward the interaction partner. Results converge with prior findings in that individuals with SocAnh may experience less positive and affiliative reactions in response to social interactions. They may also be less apt in interacting with social partners in affiliative ways. Notably, results of the current study also demonstrate that the simulated live social interaction developed for the current study may better elicit social affiliative behaviors and experiences than previous stimuli.