Differential Expression of Anomalous Self-Experiences in Spontaneous Speech in Clinical High-Risk and Early-Course Psychosis Quantified by Natural Language Processing.
Agrima Srivastava, Alexandria Selloni, Zarina R Bilgrami, Cansu Sarac, Alessia McGowan, Matthew Cotter, Johanna Bayer, Jessica Spark, Marija Krcmar, Melanie Formica, Kate Gwyther, Jessica A Hartmann, Ezra Ellenberg, Andrea Polari, Patrick D. Mcgorry, Jai L Shah, Alison R Yung, Romina Mizrahi, Cheryl M Corcoran, Guillermo Cecchi, Barnaby Nelson
Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging July 5, 2023 DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2023.06.007 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational cross-sectional study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 426 |
| Population | 170 healthy control participants, 167 clinical high-risk (CHR) participants, and 89 early-course psychosis (PSY) participants |
| Measures | Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences (IPASE), S-BERT semantic similarity, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, nonnegative matrix factorization of cosine similarity |
| Keywords | Humans Speech Psychotic disorders Schizophrenia Natural language processing Semantic similarity Self-disturbance Clinical high risk Anomalous self-experiences |
| Key findings | Spoken language of clinical high-risk individuals had greater semantic similarity to IPASE self-disturbance items than that of both healthy controls (s = 0.44) and early-course psychosis patients (s = 0.36), despite psychosis patients having higher IPASE scores. The authors argue this demonstrates the utility of natural language processing for differentiating clinical from healthy participants. |
Abstract
Background: Basic self-disturbance, or anomalous self-experiences (ASEs), is a core feature of the schizophrenia spectrum. We propose a novel method of natural language processing to quantify ASEs in spoken language by direct comparison to an inventory of self-disturbance, the Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences (IPASE). We hypothesized that there would be increased similarity in open-ended speech to the IPASE items in individuals with early-course psychosis (PSY) compared with healthy individuals, with clinical high-risk (CHR) individuals intermediate in similarity.
Methods: Open-ended interviews were obtained from 170 healthy control participants, 167 CHR participants, and 89 PSY participants. We calculated the semantic similarity between IPASE items and "I" sentences from transcribed speech samples using S-BERT (Sentence Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Text). Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests were used to compare distributions across groups. A nonnegative matrix factorization of cosine similarity was performed to rank IPASE items.
Results: Spoken language of CHR individuals had the greatest semantic similarity to IPASE items when compared to both healthy control (s = 0.44, p < 10-14) and PSY (s = 0.36, p < 10-6) individuals, while IPASE scores were higher among PSY than CHR group participants. In addition, the nonnegative matrix factorization approach produced a data-driven domain that differentiated the CHR group from the others.
Conclusions: We found that open-ended interviews elicited language with increased semantic similarity to the IPASE by participants in the CHR group compared with patients with psychosis. This demonstrates the utility of these methods for differentiating patients from healthy control participants. This complementary approach has the capacity to scale to large studies investigating phenomenological features of schizophrenia and potentially other clinical populations.
Citations in the library
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- Emergence of Language Related to Self-experience and Agency in Autobiographical Narratives of Individuals With Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin March 15, 2023
and 5 more in the library