Threat discrimination of real-world social interactions in schizotypal traits

Threat detection is compromised across the schizophrenia spectrum, often revealed by paranoia and delusions. Threat difficulties extend to nonclinical populations with liability toward schizophrenia. A key source of these difficulties may be due to hyper-sensitivity to social stressors in real-world environments. In a large, nonclinical sample (N = 161), we measured the influence of social context to threat detection in social interactions. Social interactions were captured in naturalistic videos and validated as threatening or nonthreatening. Deep learning models were employed to re-render the videos by parsing different amounts of social context depicted in these interactions. Then, we measured how threat detection was influenced by individual variability in schizotypal and autistic traits as a function of social context. Individuals with high schizotypal traits showed reduced threat discrimination ability in the presence of more social context, but better threat detection when the interactions were primarily reduced to body kinematics. The effect was more pronounced in individuals higher on suspicious tendencies and odd belief traits in schizotypy, and social communication traits in the autism spectrum. These results suggest that disruptions from social context may underlie threat detection difficulties across the schizophrenia spectrum.