Monocausal Attributions Along Cross-Sections of Psychosis Development and Links with Psychopathology and Data Gathering Style

Abstract

Several attributional biases have been discussed as putative causal factors in psychosis formation and maintenance. The monocausality bias in particular describes the excessive tendency to disregard multifactorial explanations and to instead attribute events to a single cause. To elucidate the role of monocausality in psychosis development, this study compared patients with an at-risk mental state of psychosis (ARMS, n = 49), first-episode patients (FEP, n = 35), chronic schizophrenia patients (SZ, n = 32) and healthy controls (HC, n = 39) on the Internal Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire—Revised. FEP patients made significantly more monocausal attributions than HC to the external-personal locus for positive events. Moreover, monocausality was linked with psychotic as well as depressive symptoms and tentatively also with a hasty data gathering style. Future studies should explore associations with other metacognitive deficits and the potential to prevent or correct the monocausality bias through psychological interventions.