Efficacy of the Social Cognition Training Program in a Sample of Outpatients with Schizophrenia

Social cognition is recognized to be a deficit in individuals suffering from schizophrenia. Numerous studies have explored the relationship between social cognition and social functioning in outpatients with schizophrenia through the use of different social cognition training programs. This study examines the efficacy of the Social Cognition Training Program (PECS in Spanish) in adults with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Data were derived from a sample of 44 non-hospitalized adult patients who presented with a DSM-IV-TR Axis I diagnosis of schizophrenia and 39 healthy controls. The 44 patients were divided into an experimental group (n=20) and a control task group (n=24) that received cognitive training. Healthy controls did not receive any treatment. Sociodemographic and clinical variables correlates were computed. The 2-way ANOVA was conducted to examine differences between groups in pre- and post-treatment measures. Intragroup differences were explored using the paired-samples t-test.

At the end of the training, patients in the experimental group showed a higher performance compared to patients in the control task group in the Hinting Task Test and in the emotion recognition of sadness, anger, fear, and disgust.

The PECS proved to be effective in the improvement of some areas of theory of mind and emotion recognition in outpatients with schizophrenia. The PECS is one of the first programs developed in Spanish to train social cognition, and the data obtained support the importance of expanding the social cognition programs to non-English language samples.