The Type of Information People with Schizophrenia Use in Ambiguous Social Situations

Differences in social perception in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

People with schizophrenia have difficulties recognizing other people's expressions, emotional states, and intentions; however, much less is known about their ability to perceive and understand social interactions. We used scenes depicting social situations to compare responses from 90 volunteers (healthy controls [HC], schizophrenia [SZ], and bipolar disorder [BD] outpatients from the Hospital del Salvador in Valparaíso, Chile) to the question: "What do you think is happening in the scene?" Independent blind raters assigned a score of 0 (absent), 1 (partial), or 2 (present) for each item based on whether the description identifies a) the context, b) the people, and c) the interaction depicted in the scenes. Regarding the context of the scenes, the SZ and BD groups scored significantly lower than the HC group, with no significant difference between the SZ and BD groups. Regarding the identification of the people and the interactions, the SZ group scored lower than the HC and BD groups, with no significant difference between the HC and BD groups. An ANCOVA was used to examine the relationship between diagnosis, cognitive performance, and the results of the social perception test. The diagnosis had an effect on context (p = .001) and people (p = .0001) but not on interactions (p = .08). Cognitive performance had a significant effect on interactions (p = .008) but not on context (p = .88) or people (p = .62). Our main result is that people with schizophrenia may have significant difficulties perceiving and understanding social encounters between other people.

Social Perception Deficit as a Factor of Vulnerability to Psychosis: A Brief Proposal for a Definition

Disturbances in social cognition are a core feature of schizophrenia. While most research in the field has focused on emotion perception, social knowledge, theory of mind, and attribution styles, the domain of social perception has received little specific attention. In this paper, we suggest that this issue can be explained by the lack of a precise and unitary definition of the concept, this leads to the existence of different competing uses of the concept and their conflation with other domains of social cognition. Relying on resources coming from the ecological approach to psychology and the phenomenological tradition in psychiatry, we propose that the concept of Social Perception should be used to refer to low-level pre-reflective processes underlying the awareness of interpersonal interactions with and between others. Clinical data suggests that people with schizophrenia have problems perceiving social situations as opportunities for social engagement, so, in order to fulfil this explanatory need, we propose that the term should be used to capture this important-yet neglected-domain of social cognition. We conclude with the discussion of some future directions for research derived from our proposal.

People with schizophrenia use less information to interpret ambiguous social situations

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The tendency of people with schizophrenia to gather insufficient information before making decisions or jumping to conclusions has been repeatedly reported. However, criticism has also been expressed regarding the ecological validity of this finding. Here we present the results obtained by a group of people with schizophrenia and a control group in a non-probabilistic task that requires obtaining items of information before interpreting an ambiguous social situation.

METHODS

Patients with schizophrenia (n = 48) and controls (n = 44) aged 18-50 years participated in the study. All subjects completed the Beads Task and the modified Social Information Preference Task.

RESULTS

Patients with schizophrenia showed a statistically significant tendency to jump to conclusions, including in the proposed novel social task. Unlike other studies, we were unable to find a relationship between this bias and greater severity of psychotic symptoms.

LIMITATIONS

We did not include patients with high levels of psychotic symptoms or a clinical control group.

CONCLUSIONS

The tendency to jump to conclusions in schizophrenia could be present in everyday interpersonal situations.