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Social cognition in schizophrenia

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 16, pages 620–631 (2015)Cite this article

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Key Points

  • Social cognitive impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia and is closely related to the impaired daily functioning of people who have this disorder.

  • Several social cognitive subprocesses have been studied in individuals with schizophrenia, including face perception, voice perception, motor resonance, affect sharing, mentalizing, emotion experience and emotion regulation.

  • Each of these social subprocesses is associated with particular neural systems. These systems are partly distinct but also contain some regions that overlap with systems involved in other social cognitive processes.

  • People with schizophrenia consistently show impairment in reflective aspects of social processing, including face perception, voice perception, mentalizing and emotion regulation.

  • By contrast, aspects of reflexive social cognition, including motor resonance, affect sharing and emotion experience, seem to be relatively intact in these individuals.

  • Empathy is an example of a complex social cognitive function that is impaired in individuals with schizophrenia and incorporates several specific social cognitive subprocesses, including social cue perception, affect sharing, mentalizing and emotion regulation, among others.

Abstract

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit impaired social cognition, which manifests as difficulties in identifying emotions, feeing connected to others, inferring people's thoughts and reacting emotionally to others. These social cognitive impairments interfere with social connections and are strong determinants of the degree of impaired daily functioning in such individuals. Here, we review recent findings from the fields of social cognition and social neuroscience and identify the social processes that are impaired in schizophrenia. We also consider empathy as an example of a complex social cognitive function that integrates several social processes and is impaired in schizophrenia. This information may guide interventions to improve social cognition in patients with this disorder.

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Figure 1: Brain regions associated with social processes.
Figure 2: Social cognitive processes in schizophrenia.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank A. Jimenez and J. Wynn for their comments on drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, 760 Westwood Plaza, Room 27–462, Los Angeles, 90024–1759, California, USA

    Michael F. Green, William P. Horan & Junghee Lee

  2. Department of Veterans Affairs, Desert Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Building 210A, Room 125, 11301 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, 90073, California, USA

    Michael F. Green, William P. Horan & Junghee Lee

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M.F.G. has been a paid consultant for AbbVie, DSP, Forum and Takeda, is a member of the Scientific Board of Mnemosyne and has received research funds from Amgen and Forum. W.P.H. and J.L. declare no competing interests.

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Glossary

Event-related potentials

(ERPs). A way of analysing electroencephalography (EEG) data during cognitive tasks by time-locking EEG activity to specific events (for example, stimulus onset or responses) and extracting neural activity that can be represented as waveforms that reflect certain sensory or cognitive processes.

N170

An event-related potential component that has a negative peak around 170 ms after stimulus presentation at occipitotemporal sites and is associated with processing the structural information of faces.

N250

An event-related potential component that has a negative peak around 250 ms after stimulus presentation at frontocentral sites and is associated with processing facial emotional information.

Prosody

The acoustic properties of speech that provide critical information beyond the meaning of words or grammatical structure, such as emotional state, emphasis, contrast and focus.

Magnetoencephalography

(MEG). A functional neuroimaging method that records magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brain to assess brain activity during rest or cognitive tasks; it generally has better temporal resolution than functional magnetic resonance imaging and better spatial resolution than electroencephalography.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

(TMS). A non-invasive procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate small regions of the brain and can be used to probe the functional activity of specific brain regions.

Default mode network

A set of brain regions that are activated (as identified using functional magnetic resonance imaging) when individuals are in a resting state, not focusing on the outside world, and are deactivated when individuals direct attention to the outside world.

Cognitive reappraisal

A method of regulating emotion by construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that changes its meaning and emotional impact.

Electromyography

(EMG). A non-invasive procedure that measures the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles and has been used to assess the activity of facial muscles related to social interaction.

Oxytocin

A neuropeptide that acts both as a hormone and a neurotransmitter and is known to play an important part in regulating mammalian social behaviours.

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Green, M., Horan, W. & Lee, J. Social cognition in schizophrenia. Nat Rev Neurosci 16, 620–631 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn4005

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