Elsevier

Schizophrenia Research

Volume 193, March 2018, Pages 435-437
Schizophrenia Research

Preliminary psychometric properties of the brief Negative Symptom Scale in youth at Clinical High-Risk for psychosis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2017.07.051Get rights and content

Abstract

Preliminary psychometric properties of an adapted version of the Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) are reported in youth at Clinical High-Risk for psychosis (CHR). Participants included 29 CHR youth who met criteria for a prodromal syndrome on the Structured Interview for Prodromal Syndromes (SIPS). The adapted BNSS demonstrated excellent internal consistency, convergent validity, and discriminant validity, suggesting that the BNSS has utility for assessing negative symptoms in a CHR population.

Section snippets

Role of funding source

Research was supported by K23-MH092530 to Dr. Strauss and a State University of New York Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence Grant to Dr. Strauss.

Contributors

G.P.S. designed the study, conducted study assessments, and performed statistical analyses. G.P.S. and H.C.C. wrote the initial draft of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

G.P.S. is one of the original developers of the Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) and receives royalties and consultation fees from ProPhase LLC in connection with commercial use of the BNSS and other professional activities.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the participants who dedicated their time to this research, as well as staff and students in Dr. Strauss' laboratory who conducted scheduling and carried out research assessments: Katherine Frost Visser, Kayla Whearty, Lindsay Morra, Elizabeth Dickinson, Kathryn Ossenfort, and Laura Crespo.

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    There are also issues associated with adapting existing scales designed for adults with diagnosable psychotic disorders to the CHR population. The CAINS (Gur et al., 2015) and BNSS (Strauss and Chapman, 2018) were both recently adapted for use in CHR youth. The adaptations focused on revising item probes (i.e., questions used in the interview) to make them more applicable to CHR youth, but did not modify item anchors that are used to make ratings.

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    Whether self-reports have previously been developed to evaluate psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia (Niv et al., 2007) and prodromal psychotic symptoms (Kobayashi et al., 2008; Kelleher et al., 2011), they do not allow screening negative symptoms. The recent scales, BNSS and CAINS were adapted for assessing negative symptoms in clinical high-risk population but are still based on interviews (Strauss and Chapman, 2018; Gur et al., 2015). Consequently, the SNS based on self-assessment might be a valuable and complementary tool for detecting negative symptoms at an early stage of illness.

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    Factor analysis revealed that these five symptom domains loaded onto two separable dimensions, i.e., motivation-pleasure (i.e., amotivation) and emotional expressivity (i.e., DE) (Kirkpatrick et al., 2011; Strauss et al., 2012b). A recent study has applied BNSS in ARMS individuals and demonstrated excellent internal consistency and validity, thereby suggesting the utility of BNSS in evaluating negative symptoms in at-risk populations (Strauss and Chapman, 2017). In the current report, we present a cross-sectional analysis for a group of Chinese individuals with ARMS in Hong Kong with an aim to examine (1) the factor structure of negative symptoms and (2) the potential differential relationships of negative symptom dimensions with functional levels at baseline.

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