Negative symptoms and social cognition: identifying targets for psychological interventions

How to improve treatment for negative symptoms is a continuing topic of debate. Suggestions have been made to advance psychological understanding of negative symptoms by focusing on the social cognitive processes involved in symptom formation and maintenance.

Following the recommendations by the National Institute of Mental Health workshop on social cognition in schizophrenia, this study investigated associations between negative symptoms and various aspects of social cognition including Theory of Mind (ToM), attribution, empathy, self-esteem, and interpersonal self-concepts in 75 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and 75 healthy controls.

Negative symptoms were significantly associated with difficulties in ToM, less readiness to be empathic, lower self-esteem, less self-serving bias, negative self-concepts related to interpersonal abilities, and dysfunctional acceptance beliefs. Different aspects of social cognition were mildly to moderately correlated and interacted in their impact on negative symptoms: Difficulties in ToM were associated with negative symptoms in persons with low but not in persons with medium or high levels of self-esteem. Taken together, the social cognition variables and their hypothesized interaction explained 39% of the variance in negative symptoms after controlling for neurocognition and depression.

The results highlight the relevance of self-concepts related to social abilities, dysfunctional beliefs, and global self-worth alone and in interaction with ToM deficits for negative symptoms and thereby provide a helpful basis for advancing psychosocial interventions.