Social cognition theories and their implications for schizophrenia spectrum disorders

This article presents a systematic theoretical review of the major approaches in the psychology of social cognition – a field concerned with the processes by which individuals perceive, interpret, and construct knowledge about the social world. The relevance of the work is determined by the absence in the Russian-language literature of integrative conceptual frameworks unifying disparate theoretical approaches into a single hierarchical model, as well as by the growing interest in clinical applications of social cognitive research, particularly with respect to schizophrenia spectrum disorders, in which social cognitive impairments constitute one of the key factors of social dysfunction. The significance of the work is further determined by the fact that social cognitive impairments in schizophrenia spectrum disorders span all levels of the hierarchy, which makes the systematic organisation of theoretical approaches a necessary condition for the development of differentiated diagnostic and corrective strategies. The review examines theories of perceptual processing of social and non-social stimuli (biological motion perception, face perception, and voice perception), symbolic interactionism, the selective exposure hypothesis, the social identity framework, constructivist approaches (frame theory and script theory), theory of mind, and social constructionism. The analysis of each approach is accompanied by a consideration of its clinical significance. It is argued that these approaches do not represent competing accounts but rather complementary levels of a single process, spanning from basic perceptual processing, symbolic interpretation, and motivational filtering of information to script-based anticipation, mentalising, and the dialogical coordination of meaning. Predictive processing is considered as a transversal principle unifying all levels of the framework, enabling the mechanisms of each level to be described within a single computational logic. An integrative model is proposed in which social cognition is conceived as a hierarchically organised system. The proposed model is considered a promising foundation for further convergence of classical theoretical concepts with contemporary neurocognitive and computational approaches, as well as for the clinical operationalisation of each of the described levels.