The relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology in people with schizophrenia: social cognition as the mediator

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Adrian Raine¹  Bess YH Lam²  Tatia MC Lee³ 

[1] Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3809 Walnut Street, Jerry Lee Centre of Criminology, 19104, Philadelphia, PA, USA;Laboratory of Neuropsychology, The Jockey Club Tower, The University of Hong Kong, Rm656, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China;Laboratory of Neuropsychology, The Jockey Club Tower, The University of Hong Kong, Rm656, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China;Laboratory of Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;Institute of Clinical Neuropsychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;

关键词: Cognition;    Faux pas;    Eyes test;    Theory of mind;    Schizophrenia;    Emotion;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-14-138

 received in 2013-10-08, accepted in 2014-05-02,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology in people with schizophrenia has been established. The present study examined whether social cognition could mediate this relationship.MethodsThere were 119 participants (58 people with paranoid schizophrenia and 61 healthy controls) participated in this study. Neurocognition was assessed by Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test, the Judgment of Line Orientation Test, and the Tower of London Test. Psychiatric symptoms in people with schizophrenia were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Social cognition was measured by the Faux Pas Test, the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index.ResultsResults were consistent with previous findings that neurocognition and social cognition were impaired in the clinical participants. A novel observation is that social cognition significantly mediated the relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that neurocognitive deficits predispose people with schizophrenia to worse psychiatric symptoms through the impairment of social cognition. Findings of the present study provide important insight into a functional model of schizophrenia that could guide the development of cost-effective interventions for people with schizophrenia.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lam et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.