Brain Training and Schizophrenia: How to Boost Social Cognitive Skills

Indi­vid­u­als suf­fer­ing from schiz­o­phre­nia show social cog­ni­tive deficits, that is dif­fi­cul­ties in per­ceiv­ing and under­stand­ing the social world. Research shows that schiz­o­phre­nia is accom­pa­nied by social cog­ni­tion prob­lems such as prob­lems iden­ti­fy­ing facial expres­sions, under­stand­ing and respond­ing to social cues (e.g., body lan­guage), under­stand­ing that oth­ers have dif­fer­ent men­tal states and thoughts than one­self (also called The­o­ry of mind). These deficits are usu­al­ly per­sis­tent over time and resist phar­ma­co­log­i­cal treat­ment. Inter­est­ing­ly, social cog­ni­tion may be train­able. This recent arti­cle reviews the research and shows that social cog­ni­tive train­ing programs :

• pro­duce a mod­er­ate to large improve­ment in the recog­ni­tion of facial emotions
• pro­duce a small­er improve­ment in The­o­ry of mind
• do not improve social per­cep­tion (such as under­stand­ing voice into­na­tion or body language)

The pos­i­tive effects of train­ing seem to gen­er­al­ized to dai­ly life: the com­mu­ni­ty and insti­tu­tion­al func­tion­ing of out-patients and in-patients respec­tive­ly was also observed to improve after train­ing. These are very promis­ing results that com­ple­ment those show­ing train­ing effects for schiz­o­phrenic patients in oth­er domain of cog­ni­tion such as atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tion, work­ing mem­ory, ver­bal learning.

Relat­ed post: Schiz­o­phre­nia Research is Lead­ing the Way in Cog­ni­tive Remediation