Social skill and social cognition in adolescents at genetic risk for psychosis

Abstract

Adolescents at genetic high risk (GHR) for schizophrenia have shown social skill impairments and there is some evidence to suggest they have Theory of Mind (ToM) deficits; however no research has used a standardized, performance-based behavioral measure to assess social functioning in this population nor evaluated ToM with a well-validated measure. We evaluated the psychometric properties of a new, theoretically-derived assessment of social functioning in GHR adolescents: the "High-Risk Social Challenge" task (HiSoC). The second aim was to explore whether GHR adolescents would show social skill and ToM deficits as compared to a non-psychiatric control (NPC) group. The present study evaluated social functioning with the HiSoC and ToM with the Eyes Test in 23 GHR adolescents and 31 NPCs. The HiSoC demonstrated high levels of reliability and validity. The GHR adolescents showed social skills impairments, but not ToM deficits. The results suggest that the HiSoC is a potentially useful new measure of social functioning in GHR adolescents. Furthermore, the findings add to the current body of literature that indicates that social skill impairments are related to schizophrenia vulnerability.

Dynamic Association Between Interpersonal Functioning and Positive Symptom Dimensions of Psychosis Over Time: A Longitudinal Study of Healthy Adolescents

“…35,36 These deviations may increase the probability of psychotic symptom expression, as early subclinical pathological ideas are not corrected in social interaction, resulting in even worse interpersonal functioning. 37 Breaking this cycle may be important and may offer opportunities for early intervention, 38 eg, using cognitive behavioral therapy.…”

Detecting facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia using dynamic stimuli of varying intensities

“…Decades of research have established that individuals with SZ have difficulty in reading and interpreting facial emotion when compared with control subjects (e.g., [17,65,10,43]; impairments which have been demonstrated to be moderately stable over time [32,2]. Impairments in facial emotion recognition have been linked to social and occupational outcomes such as unemployment, need for assisted living [58,29], decreased social competence, conversational skills and social interest [49,30], and inappropriate personal appearance [23]. This impact of facial emotion recognition deficits is perhaps not surprising when one considers that facial emotional expressions are the building blocks of social interaction, conveying vital non-verbal cues for inferences about the motivation and intentions of others [14].…”

An fMRI study of “theory of mind” in at-risk states of psychosis: Comparison with manifest schizophrenia and healthy controls

“…As regards ToM, a few studies have addressed this question behaviourally in the recent past. While Couture et al (2008) found that subjects at high risk for psychosis -as determined using the Structured Interview for Prodromal Symptoms (SIPS; Miller et al, 1999) -performed comparably well compared to healthy controls on a task that requires inference of complex mental states from viewing the eye region of a person in still photographs (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET); Baron-Cohen et al, 2001), a finding that was recently replicated (Gibson et al, 2010). Chung et al (2008) showed that subjects at high risk for psychosis -as determined using the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States (CAARMS; Yung et al, 2005) -performed more poorly on a second-order ToM task (that is, a representation of another person's state of mind about a third person's mental processes) and an advanced ToM task compared to healthy controls, but not on a first-order ToM task (that is, a representation of another person's state of mind) or a simpler cartoon task.…”