P.2.044 - Social Cognition Analyzer Application (SCAN) - a new approach to analyse social cognition in schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction Schizophrenic patients have serious impairments in the following social cognitive domains that are consistent with organizational models of neural systems in social neuroscience: affective face perception, affective prosody perception, mentalizing, emotion regulation and experience sharing [1]. Impairments in social processing in schizophrenia have been found to significantly contribute to poor overall community functioning to the functional outcame of the disease and to quality of life. For individulaised treatment planning as well as to provide targeted recovery-focused and person-focused social cognitive therapeutic interventions, individualised assessment of social processing is needed. Objectives In the present study our first aim was to develop a new computer application for collecting data about schizophrenic patients social processing in all the well investigated social cognitive domains. Our second aim was the qualitative analysis of the data, modeling the results and further develop the application to individually analyse social cognitive impariments of schizophrenic patients. Methods 101 healthy individuals and 86 schizophrenic patients were tested with a newly developed psychometric software, called SCAN (scan.ttk.pte.hu) for different social cognitive domains. SCAN was capable to detect response rates and response times as well. Social cognitive domains were assessed with a battery of questionnaires of social cognition. Affective face perception was assessed with Emotional Recognition Test Faces [2]. Affective prosody perception was assessed with the Hungarian version of an affective prosody task. Mentalizing function was assessed with Faux Pas Test and a reduced version of Eyes Test [3]. Social perception was assessed with a self-developed movie task, in which videotaped scenes of interpersonal situations were watched, based on IPT [4], and empathy was assessed with a newly developed picture selection task. The distribution of response rates and response times were checked with Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit. As distributions of response rates did not prove to be normal, Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance by ranks was performed to compare group medians across variables. As distribution of response times proved to be normal, independent samples t-tests were performed. Statistical distributions of response rates were analysed with OpenOffice 5.0. Results Taking into consideration both response rates and times it was found that patients performed worse than controls (p y = k · xz where y = calculated distribution-value, k = constant value, x = percent of the participants, z = a constant exponent, where 2 Based on these results, SCAN was further developed to analyze and graphically represent social cognitive abilities of patients. Conclusion Using SCAN, individualized social cognitive therapeutic interventions can be planned for schizophrenic patients. Furthermore, we propose that power-law distribution of social processing might be a mathematical explanation of the evolution theory of schizophrenia.