Emotion Prediction and Social Consequences in Elevated Schizotypy

Successfully navigating the social world requires people to make accurate predictions about others. Individual differences in emotion prediction, or the ability to predict someone’s subsequent emotion given their current emotional state, can lead to variability in social success. Across three studies (N = 1,024) we find evidence that individuals with heightened schizotypy display worse emotion prediction accuracy. Further, this difficulty with emotion prediction is associated with increased feelings of loneliness, diminished social support, smaller social networks, and partially explains some of these social difficulties in individuals with heightened negative schizotypy. We also found that individuals with heightened schizotypy had disruptions in the ability to use the affective information sources that support emotion prediction: typicality of one’s own personal emotion dynamics, understanding of one’s emotional experiences, and perceiving others’ emotions. These findings highlight the importance of emotion prediction as a social cognitive construct that should be considered in future research for individuals across the schizophrenia spectrum.