The Social Perceptual Deficits of Schizophrenia

This article summarizes a series of studies conducted by our group that examined the social perceptual deficits of schizophrenia. Research suggested that social perceptual deficits are more pronounced in patients with nonparanoid schizophrenia than comparison groups comprising normal controls or individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. The social perceptual deficits of schizophrenia were affected by the level of abstraction of cue descriptors; the level of emotional arousal engendered by the situation; the presence of extraneous, emotionally arousing stimuli; and the familiarity of the situation. These deficits were not found in standardization and cross-validation samples of normal controls, suggesting that these differential deficits represent a characteristic of the disorder rather than a psychometric confound. Social perceptual deficits in schizophrenia were significantly associated with verbal recall memory and relatively unrelated to visual vigilance. These latter findings were used in a study on rehabilitation of cue perception which showed that memory rehabilitation significantly improved cue perception whereas attention focusing strategies had no appreciable effects.