Social cognition in schizophrenia

Abstract

Patients with schizophrenia display alterations in social cognition, as well as in the realm of neurocognition. It is still unclear to what extent these two cognitive domains represent two separate dimensions or different expressions of a unified deficit. Tasks used to assess social cognition subcomponents cover basic social cognition, such as mentalisation, data collection and making conclusions, source monitoring and characteristics of life-styles. The variety of findings of various studies is probably related to the fact that most studies considered social cognition as one-dimensional construct represented, for example, by unique measurements of emotional recognition. Research results dealing with social cognition suggest that the impairment of social cognition is the characteristic feature of schizophrenia and have important implications for the development, course and outcome of this disorder.

Keywords

• schizophrenia
• social cognition
• functional outcome
• emotional perception
• theory of mind