One social interaction after another: Dynamic modeling of social experience in schizophrenia

Social dysfunction in schizophrenia reflects not only the frequency of social contact but also the quality of interactions when they occur, and their impact on social experience. This study employed ecological momentary assessments (EMA), anchored to social interactions in daily life, to examine components of social experience: perceived acceptance, self-confidence, consummatory pleasure, negative affect, and motivation for future social engagement. Veterans with (n = 34) and without schizophrenia (n = 31) completed smartphone EMA five times per day for seven days. Multilevel vector autoregressive (mlVAR) network models estimated contemporaneous associations within interactions, temporal associations across successive interactions, and centrality of each component within the resulting networks. The contemporaneous networks showed that perceived acceptance within an interaction was associated with more enjoyment and greater social motivation in both groups. Centrality analyses for contemporaneous networks indicated that consummatory pleasure and perceived acceptance showed the greatest relative association with other network components within an interaction for both groups. The temporal networks showed that social motivation persisted across interactions and predicted more enjoyment and higher self-confidence at subsequent interactions in both groups. Descriptively, group differences emerged for negative affect, which was more temporally persistent across interactions in schizophrenia. Centrality analyses for temporal networks indicated that social motivation was most strongly connected to subsequent social experience components across interactions in both groups. Together, findings from contemporaneous and temporal networks highlight the roles that social motivation and negative affect play in shaping social experience within and across interactions in schizophrenia.