Social skills and social and nonsocial cognitive functioning in schizophrenia

Abstract

Background: Persons with schizophrenia show deficits across a broad range of social domains, and their social skill deficits are thought, to some extent, to be caused by cognitive dysfunction. We conducted a review and concluded that both nonsocial and social cognition were strongly related to social skills in schizophrenia. However the relationship between social and nonsocial cognition and the pathways to social skills remain unclear.

Aims: In this study, we attempted to investigate how nonsocial and social cognitive functioning and psychiatric symptoms determine social skills in persons with schizophrenia.

Method: Sixty-four subjects who met the ICD-10 criteria for schizophrenia were evaluated with a semi-structured role-play test, BPRS, and a psychological test battery for attention, verbal fluency, and executive functioning.

Results: The ability to recognize the goal of the situation was partly determined by attention and social cognition independently. The processing of problem-solving and planning alternative behaviors was partly determined by the ability to recognize the goal, disorganization symptoms, and verbal fluency. The ability to send one's intention and emotion to others effectively was partly determined by processing skill, negative and disorganization symptoms, executive functioning, and verbal fluency.

Conclusions: The structural equations model results revealed that the proposed model fitted the sample data well. The model proposed demonstrated that the cognitive chain constructs mediated the relationship between social input and behavioral output, and both social and nonsocial cognitive functioning directly influenced some step of the cognitive chain constructs.

Keywords:

• Behavior therapy
• schizophrenia
• social skills
• cognitive functioning