Am J Psychiatry 1993; 150:589-594
Copyright © 1993 by American Psychiatric Association
Schizophrenic patients' sensitivity to social cues: the role of abstraction
PW Corrigan and MF Green
Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, IL.
OBJECTIVE: Since individuals with schizophrenia often have difficulty with
abstract tasks, they should have more problems recognizing abstract social
cues (e.g., inferences regarding actors' affect and goals) than concrete
cues (e.g., observations of actors' behavior and dialogue). Moreover,
recognition of abstract and concrete cues should interact with the level of
emotional arousal engendered by the situation; previous research has shown
that schizophrenic patients perform better on cue recognition tasks when
the situation produces moderate rather than low levels of arousal. METHOD:
These hypotheses were tested in 24 patients with schizophrenia diagnosed
according to the DSM-III-R criteria and 15 normal comparison subjects. All
subjects viewed eight short vignettes of interpersonal situations that
produce low and moderate levels of arousal. They then answered questions
representing perception of abstract and concrete cues that had been matched
for difficulty and consistency. RESULTS: The schizophrenic patients were
significantly less sensitive to interpersonal cues than the normal
subjects. The patients were also less sensitive to abstract than to
concrete social cues, and for them there was a significant interaction
between cue abstraction level and situational arousal. Specifically, the
schizophrenic subjects performed worse on the abstract cue recognition task
for the low-arousal situations. CONCLUSIONS: Findings regarding the social
cue recognition patterns of schizophrenic patients could play an important
role in the development of valid measures of social cognition for this
population.
