Cognición social en esquizofrenia: aspectos cognitivos y neurobiológicos

Abstract

Social cognition in schizophrenia is currently one of the major fields of interest in studies of this disorder. It is commonly conceptualised as a set of mental operations underlying social interactions, and therefore related to the ability to interpret and predict the behaviour of others in different social contexts. The research community has defined the functional areas that constitute the domain of social cognition, including, at least, the theory of mind, sensory perception, social perception, and attributional bias. Different bodies of evidence have shown that alterations in these functions in patients with schizophrenia are linked to some of their main psychopathological dysfunctions, such as defects in sensory perception, insight and attributional origin, and authorship of human acts. These behavioural alterations have been linked to structural and functional disturbances in the constituents of the so-called social brain. This includes a set of medial parietal, temporal, and pre-frontal areas that have been associated with some anomalies in the theory of mind, the perception of emotions, and the ability to consider the perspective of others, phenomena commonly found in schizophrenia. Future research in the domain of social cognition should be aimed at clarifying its relationship with the social brain and neurocognition.

Facial emotion recognition and its association with symptom severity, functionality, and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: preliminary results

“…Several studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia experience difficulty with facial emotion recognition (Pérez-Rincón, Cortés, & Díaz-Martínez, 1999), as do their first-degree relatives (Chan, Li, Cheung, & Gong, 2010;Saracco-Alvarez, Fresán, & Escamilla-Orozco, 2013), which points to the possibility of a shared genetic load (Mendoza et al, 2011). It has even been thought that facial emotion recognition may be the key to understanding social dysfunction in schizophrenia (García, Aliste, & Soto, 2018) and therefore be a predictive variable of functional prognosis (On, Cotton, Farhall, Killackey, & Allot, 2016). There is also evidence that patients with schizophrenia are slower than controls in tasks involving facial emotion recognition (Watanuki et al, 2016) and that they recognize positive emotions such as joy better and more frequently, and have difficulty recognizing negative facial emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and disgust (Jetha, Zheng, Goldberg, Segalowitz, & Schmidt, 2013;Romero-Ferreiro et al, 2016).…”

Differences between individuals with schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder and healthy controls in social cognition and mindfulness skills: A controlled study

“…The study of social cognition (SC) has drawn the attention of researchers, emerging as a key domain for the understanding and treatment of mental health problems [1,2]. SC can be understood independently from neurocognition (i.e., attention, language, and executive functions) and can be considered a mediator between neurocognition and social behaviour [3]. SC involves a set of mental operations underlying social interactions [4] and the capacity to understand oneself, others, social situations and interactions in a social world [5].…”

“…Evidence has supported the notion that poorer SC performance is linked to psychopathology, although most studies have primarily addressed only schizophrenia (SZ) [3,7,8]. Impairments in SC have been widely reported in individuals with SZ and have manifested as difficulties in identifying emotions, feeling connected to others, inferring people’s thoughts and reacting emotionally to others; these impairments are strong determinants of the degree of impaired daily functioning facing individuals with SZ [9].…”

“…Patients with SZ showed larger deficits across SC domains than healthy controls (HC) [1,10,11], with large effect sizes for ToM ( d = -.96) and emotion recognition ( d = .91) [1]. Recent studies have confirmed that the impairment or deterioration in ToM–the ability to infer the mental states of others, including intentions, dispositions and beliefs [12,13]–or mentalization plays a crucial role in the psychopathological process of SZ [3]. The literature has also reported impairments in the perception of social cues, emotion recognition and attributional style in individuals with SZ [3,9].…”

“…Recent studies have confirmed that the impairment or deterioration in ToM–the ability to infer the mental states of others, including intentions, dispositions and beliefs [12,13]–or mentalization plays a crucial role in the psychopathological process of SZ [3]. The literature has also reported impairments in the perception of social cues, emotion recognition and attributional style in individuals with SZ [3,9]. Empathy impairments have also been demonstrated in individuals with SZ, and these impairments have been viewed as an emergent phenomenon that depends on multiple components of SC [9,14–16].…”