Lower- and Higher-Level Social Cognitive Factors Across Individuals With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders and Healthy Controls: Relationship With Neurocognition and Functional Outcome

Abstract

These results uniquely indicate that distinct lower- and higher-level aspects of social cognition exist across SSDs and healthy controls. Further, mentalizing may be particularly linked to negative symptoms and functional outcome. This informs future studies of the neural circuitry underlying social cognition and the development of targeted treatment options for improving functional outcome.

The Factor Structure of Social Cognition in Schizophrenia: A Focus on Replication With Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Machine Learning

“…Our finding of separate factors for low and high social cognition replicates the findings not only of our previous EFA study using nearly identical social cognitive measures (Mancuso et al, 2011) but also of some studies using nonoverlapping measures and different factor-analytic approaches (e.g., Mehta et al, 2014, who used PCA;Oliver et al, 2019, who used EFA first and CFA second in the same data set). Note that even the CFA by Browne et al (2016) actually statistically favored two separate low-and high-level factors.…”

“…Second, it is only moderately correlated with the hinting task (rs = .2-.4; Buck et al, 2016;Morrison et al, 2019). Third, the TASIT clearly loaded on a separate high-level factor in the current and most previous studies (Mancuso et al, 2011;Oliver et al, 2019). The one study that used the TASIT and did not find a separate high-level factor examined a relatively small sample of individuals with psychosis for this type of analysis (n = 65; Buck et al, 2016).…”

“…Exploratory factor analyses have ranged from two (Buck, Healey, Gagen, Roberts, & Penn, 2016;Ziv, Leiser, & Levine, 2011) to three (Corbera, Wexler, Ikezawa, & Bell, 2013;Mancuso et al, 2011;Mehta et al, 2014) to four factors (Bell, Tsang, Greig, & Bryson, 2009;Stouten, Veling, Laan, van der Helm, & van der Gaag, 2017). Likewise, three confirmatory factor analyses examined models ranging from one to four factors and reported support for either one-factor (Browne et al, 2016), two-factor (Oliver et al, 2019), or four-factor models (Bell et al, 2009). This lack of replicability across studies likely reflects methodological factors such as the use of different social cognitive tasks, the frequent use of a small number of tasks focused on a relatively narrow range of social cognitive processes, and variability in clinical sample characteristics.…”

“…In addition to inconsistencies in the structure of social cognition in psychosis, there are inconsistent findings regarding relations between social-cognitive factors and external correlates. For example, some studies have found significant associations with negative symptoms (Browne et al, 2016;Oliver et al, 2019), whereas others have not (Buck et al, 2016;Mancuso et al, 2011). Likewise, some studies have found significant associations with measures of real-world functioning (Mancuso et al, 2011), whereas others have not (Buck et al, 2016).…”

Severe childhood trauma and clinical and neurocognitive features in schizotypal personality disorder

“…Because childhood trauma occurs during a critical time for the development of social functioning skills, traumatic experiences can disrupt the development of these skills, resulting in lifelong difficulties in interpersonal functioning. For example, childhood trauma can disrupt the normative development of self‐awareness, social cognitive skills , and the ability to develop secure attachments to others , which have been linked to the development of negative symptoms . Consistent with this notion, in longitudinal studies of early psychosis, childhood trauma predicts social functioning difficulties in adulthood .…”