Abstract
Regarding the notion of putative “best” practices in social neuroscience and science in general, we contend that following established procedures has advantages, but prescriptive uniformity in methodology can obscure flaws, bias thinking, stifle creativity, and restrict exploration. Generating hypotheses is at least as important as testing hypotheses. To illustrate this process, we describe the following exploratory study. Psychiatric patients have difficulties with social functioning that affect their quality of life adversely. To investigate these impediments, we compared the performances of patients with schizophrenia and those with bipolar disorder to healthy controls on a task that involved matching photographs of facial expressions to a faceless protagonist in each of a series of drawn cartoon emotion-related situations. These scenarios involved either a single character (Nonsocial) or multiple characters (Social). The Social scenarios were also Congruent, with everyone in the cartoon displaying the same emotion, or Noncongruent (with everyone displaying a different emotion than the protagonist should). In this preliminary study, both patient groups produced lower scores than controls (p < 0.001), but did not perform differently from each other. All groups performed best on the social-congruent items and worst on the social-noncongruent items (p < 0.001). Performance varied inversely with illness duration, but not symptom severity. Complete emotional, social, cognitive, or perceptual inability is unlikely because these patient groups could still do this task. Nevertheless, the differences we saw could be meaningful functionally and clinically significant and deserve further exploration. Therefore, we stress the need to continue developing novel, alternative ways to explore social cognition in patients with psychiatric disorders and to clarify which elements of the multidimensional process contribute to difficulties in daily functioning.
Highlights
We found a group main effect (F(2,84) = 25.850, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.381, observed power = 1.000), wherein the choices of expressions made by both patient groups differed from those made by the healthy control group, and they did not differ from each other
The present findings revealed that both patient groups produced lower scores than their healthy peers on this task of matching photos of key emotional facial expressions to cartoons of everyday scenarios
It would be tempting to claim that the difference between the level of performance of the patient groups compared to the healthy controls was the result of the patient groups’ impairment in understanding the scenarios, recognizing the emotions expressed by the faces, decoding social inference, or knowing what the correct emotional responses should be
Summary
“There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” [1]. The notion of Best Practices has become a popular mantra for administrators throughout the business, government, higher education, and other sectors of enterprise. Best Practices are meant to represent the optimum way of doing things so that effectiveness, efficiency, and success are maximized, while simultaneously minimizing negative outcomes or even eliminating them altogether. Similar to standards of care in medicine, and purportedly established by research and evidence, Best Practices are meant to be a set of particular techniques and methodologies that all of those working in a particular field should employ
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