@article{ref1,
title="Trust and general risk-taking in externalizing adolescent inpatients versus non-externalizing psychiatric controls",
journal="Scandinavian journal of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology",
year="2019",
author="Mellick, William and Sharp, Carla and Sumlin, Eric",
volume="7",
number="",
pages="92-96",
abstract="BACKGROUND: Interpersonal trust is an important target for the conceptualization, identification, and treatment of psychiatric disorders marked by interpersonal difficulties. A core feature of adolescent externalising disorders is interpersonal impairment. However, research investigating trust is scarce. A relatively novel approach for studying trust in psychopathology is through examination of social decision making using behavioural economic games. <br><br>OBJECTIVE: To employ a modified trust game in order to determine whether externalising adolescents exhibit perturbed decision making in social and/or nonsocial contexts. <br><br>METHODS: Externalising inpatient adolescents (n = 141) and non-externalising psychiatric controls (n = 122) completed self-report measures of psychopathology and invested in an iterative trust game played under two conditions: social (trust) and nonsocial (lottery condition), each consisting of five consecutive trials. <br><br>RESULTS: Externalising adolescents showed a limited increase in trust investments, compared to a significant increase in lottery investments, across early game trials relative to psychiatric controls. This significant three-way interaction between experimental group, game condition, and trials became most evident at the second trial of games. Between-group differences on trust investments were non-significant. However, externalising adolescents invested significantly less in the trust relative to lottery condition, an effect unobserved in psychiatric controls. <br><br>CONCLUSIONS: This study tentatively suggests that adolescent externalising disorders may be associated with an insensitivity to normative social exchange which may arise, in part, from a lack of anticipated co-player reciprocity. It is not the level of trust that may distinguish externalising adolescents but perhaps the form of which the trust exchange takes shape. <br><br>CONCLUSIONS are tempered by the fact that the employed trust game did not include feedback in the form of co-player repayments.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="2245-8875",
doi="10.21307/sjcapp-2019-013",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.21307/sjcapp-2019-013"
}