Social cognitive deficits have traditionally been linked with autism spectrum conditions. However, a recent paper from Cambridge Cognition suggests that deficits in social cognition are exhibited across a range of neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders.
Our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others is an important part of empathising and everyday social interaction. The cognitive processes that drive these abilities are known as social cognition, and include the ability to identify emotions (typically from vocal or facial expressions) as well as infer more complex mental states, known as theory of mind.
Deficits in these processes have traditionally been associated with autism spectrum disorders and have more recently been the focus of a wealth of research in patients with schizophrenia. However, a recent article by the science team at Cambridge Cognition suggests these difficulties may be more common than previously thought.
Investigating social cognition in 30 clinical groups
The paper, ‘Social cognitive dysfunction as a clinical marker: A systematic review of meta-analyses across 30 clinical conditions’, published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, combined data from 31 separate meta-analyses investigating social cognitive performance among patients with a wide range of neurological, psychiatric and developmental disorders.1
They reported that almost all of the clinical groups included in the review performed significantly worse than healthy controls on both facial emotion recognition and theory of mind tasks (Figure 1). Across these patient groups, deficits in social cognitive domains were broadly similar in magnitude to those previously reported for more established aspects of cognition, such as memory and executive function.
