Psychometric validation of social cognition measures in U.S. Hispanic individuals with schizophrenia

Little is known about cross-ethnic differences in the measurement of social cognition in minoritized groups like Hispanics, who account for a significant portion of the U.S population, potentially leading to culturally incongruent interventions. Using data from the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE), the current study conducted a cross-ethnic psychometric assessment of four social cognition measures in Hispanics diagnosed with schizophrenia (n = 73) and a non-Hispanic white group (n = 115). Tasks included Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT), Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER-40), The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) and the Hinting Task. Tasks were evaluated on test-retest reliability, utility as a repeated measure, internal consistency, sensitivity to group differences, and relationship to functional outcomes. Mean differences between ethnic groups were also analyzed. Psychometric properties were largely adequate and comparable across ethnic groups. Mean differences on emotion recognition tasks were not significantly different between ethnic groups. However, Hispanics scored significantly lower on TASIT and the Hinting Task (assessments of theory of mind), potentially indicative of the influence of racial or cultural factors in these measures. Criterion validity also varied between groups. Although there were robust associations with functional capacity and social skills in the Hispanic group, none of the social-cognitive tasks predicted real-world functional outcomes in this group. These findings suggest that caution should be exercised when using social cognition measures to assess Hispanics and making subsequent clinical decisions.