Social cognition: Concept, evaluation, and application in psychiatry

Abstract

Social cognition (SC) serves an interface between psychology and cognitive neuroscience and its conceptualization has evolved over years. SC broadly refers to a process of encoding and decoding the social information, i.e., how a person thinks about himself/herself and others in his/her social world. The refinement of various constructs of SC as well as the assessment tools has contributed to its better understanding and application in psychiatry. At present, major research groups in this field have agreed on that emotion perception, social perception, theory of mind, and attributional style to be the key domains of SC. A marked growth of evidence for the deficits in SC in various psychiatric disorders has led to the development of a plethora of evaluation tools. Although it has been largely studied in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders, lately, an increasing number of researches have been conducted in other psychiatric as well as neurological disorders. Consequent to the evidence of deficits in various domains of SC in psychiatric disorders, a number of targeted interventions have been devised. This article provides an overview of the evolution of concept, definition, and domains of SC, its evaluation, and application in psychiatry.

Keywords

• application
• concept
• measurement
• mental disorders
• psychiatry
• social cognition