The study of social cognition in schizophrenia may augment the understanding of clinical and behavioral manifestations of the disorder. In this article, the authors describe social cognition and differentiate it from nonsocial cognition. They garner evidence to support the role of social cognition in schizophrenia: Nonsocial information-processing models are limited to explain social dysfunction in schizophrenia, measures of social cognition may contribute greater variance to social functioning than measures of nonsocial cognition, task performance on nonsocial-cognitive measures may not parallel performance on social-cognitive tasks, and symptomatology may be best understood within a social-cognitive framework. They describe the potential implications of a social-cognitive model of schizophrenia for the etiology and development of the disorder.

No abstract

To determine how users of mental health services would like to be addressed by professionals, a survey of 302 persons participating in a variety of inpatient and outpatient psychiatric programs was conducted. Forty-five percent of the sample preferred the term "client," 20 percent preferred the term "patient," 8 percent preferred the term "consumer," and 27 percent either expressed no clear preference for one term or provided another term. The results suggest that no one term is favored by users of mental health services. Professionals and persons receiving mental health services are encouraged to talk over individual preferences to help establish a working alliance.