Social Cognitive Deficits in Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and First-Degree Relatives: A Large-Sample, Multi-Task Investigation

Background and Hypothesis: Individuals with schizophrenia show robust deficits in social cognition, which are associated with symptom severity and functional outcomes. These deficits are also present, but weaker, in those with related diagnoses (e.g., bipolar disorder) and in patients’ biological relatives. Nonetheless, previous work in this area is limited by small sample sizes and use of single social-cognition tasks. We address these issues using a large sample spanning individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (105) and bipolar disorder with psychotic features (37), their first-degree relatives (101), and healthy controls (53). Study Design: Participants completed tests of social cognition—including facial/auditory emotion recognition and mentalizing. Social cognition was modeled as a latent variable and its associations with diagnostic group were examined. Study Results: There was a significant effect of group on social cognition; individuals with bipolar disorder and relatives performed worse than controls but better than those with schizophrenia. There was also a group-by-task interaction, such that deficits were stronger for mentalizing than emotion recognition. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that social cognitive deficits represent a feature of schizophrenia that maps onto related genetic liability. These deficits may be particularly prominent for higher-level social cognitive abilities.