Schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Focus on social cognition and empathy

Background Schizophrenic patients show deficits in social cognition, functioning and in interpreting facial expressions. These disabilities contribute to global impairment in social and relational skills. Data started being collected in the context of the Italian Network of Research on Psychosis headed by Prof. Maj and Prof. Galderisi (Galderisi S et al. The influence of illness-related variables, personal resources and context-related factors on real-life functioning of people with schizophrenia. World Psychiatry 2014:275–87. Mucci A et al. The Specific Level of Functioning Scale: Construct validity, internal consistency and factor structure in a large Italian sample of people with schizophrenia living in the community. Schizophr Res 2014;159(1):144-50); collection in our centre went on also after the conclusion of the national project. Aims To identify the correlations among social inference, facial emotion identification and clinical history and therapies in schizophrenic patients. Material and methods We recruited patients with Schizophrenia referring to our Psychiatry Ward, AOU Maggiore della Carità, Novara, Italy. Socio-demographic characteristics were gathered; assessment of patients included The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), the Facial Emotion Identification Test (FEIT), the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS). Results Data collection is still ongoing. In a previous study we pointed out that schizophrenic patients showed social skills deficits and difficulties in identifying facial emotions. These features underlie poor and limited social relationships proper to schizophrenia. Our preliminary results revealed thatidentification of facial emotions is influenced by psychopathological symptoms especially by avolition, blunted affect and alogia. Implication will be discussed.