Maternal antipathy and neglect moderate personalizing bias in schizophrenia spectrum psychosis.

Introduction: Childhood trauma (CT) has been recognized as a risk factor for psychosis. Among the pathways implicated in the CT-psychosis association, attributional biases (ABs) hold a prominent position. ABs disrupt reality testing, thus laying a conducive ground for the emergence of paranoid symptoms. Paranoid patients have been theorized to externalize the causality of negative life events (externalizing bias; EB), mainly by blaming other people (personalizing bias; PB), in an attempt to maintain their self-esteem. Objectives: We sought to investigate the presence and intercorrelations of CT and ABs in a group of patients with schizophreniaspectrum psychosis (SSP). Methods: We compared 63 SSP inpatients to a healthy control group (HC) on measures of CT and attributional style. CT was assessed with the Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse Questionnaire (CECA.Q), and attributional style with the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire (IPSAQ). Results: SSP inpatients displayed higher levels of CT (X2 (1, N = 124) = 34.5, p < .001) and PB (U = 1309, p = .002) than HCs. EB was not detected in the SSP group. Within the SSP group, PB was negatively correlated to the severity of maternal antipathy (rs = - 0.380, p = .002) and neglect (rs = - 0.300, p = .017). Conclusions: SSP inpatients do not favor external attributions for negative events. However, when they do externalize causality for negative events, they tend to personalize the blame. If PB serves the purpose of preserving an intact self-image in paranoid patients, negative maternal rearing behaviors appear to reduce this defensive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]