Impact of social anxiety on social cognition and functioning in patients with recent-onset schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Unlabelled: Schizophrenia patients display important rates of comorbid social anxiety disorder (SAD) but few studies have directly examined how SAD affects the presentation of schizophrenia, notably social cognition deficits and functioning.

Aims: To compare social cognition performance of schizophrenia patients who meet the diagnostic criteria for a comorbid SAD (SZ+) relative to patients without such comorbidity (SZ-) and to determine if the impact of social cognition performance on functioning is moderated by that comorbidity.

Method: Social cognition performance (emotion recognition, social knowledge, and mentalizing), a control non-social reasoning task, as well as clinical symptoms and functioning were assessed in 26 patients with comorbid SAD (SZ+), 29 SZ- and 84 healthy controls.

Mentalizing in first-episode psychosis.

Mentalizing deficits have often been observed in people with schizophrenia and a few recent studies suggest that such deficits are also present in patients with first episode psychosis (FEP). It is not clear, however, whether these mentalizing deficits in FEP can be accounted for by underlying processes such as social cue recognition, social knowledge and general reasoning. In this study, we assessed mentalizing abilities in 31 people with FEP and 31 matched controls using a novel, comprehensive mentalizing task validated through the present study.

Assessment of empathy in first-episode psychosis and meta-analytic comparison with previous studies in schizophrenia.

Empathy is a multidimensional construct that relies on affective and cognitive component processes. A few studies have reported impairments of both cognitive and affective empathy components in patients with schizophrenia. It is, however, not known whether these difficulties are already present at psychosis onset.