Please join us for a special webinar Tuesday, January 26, at 12 noon EST.
Michael Green of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues will present their recent paper in Nature Neuroscience: Social cognition in schizophrenia (Green et al., 2015).
We will then hear from a panel of discussants: Melissa Green of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia; Matthew Smith of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois; Stephan Taylor of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Neeltje van Haren of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands.
It doesn’t look like it. Here is the paper summary:
Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit impaired social cognition, which manifests as difficulties in identifying emotions, feeing connected to others, inferring people’s thoughts and reacting emotionally to others. These social cognitive impairments interfere with social connections and are strong determinants of the degree of impaired daily functioning in such individuals. Here, we review recent findings from the fields of social cognition and social neuroscience and identify the social processes that are impaired in schizophrenia. We also consider empathy as an example of a complex social cognitive function that integrates several social processes and is impaired in schizophrenia. This information may guide interventions to improve social cognition in patients with this disorder.
I ran into the paper on one of the daily downloads of new research a couple of days ago. In summation: Genetic, epigenetic or environmentally induced reduction in neural connectivity between the various locales on the map graphic in some but not all dx’d with sz. Some of the reductions in neural connections have been known for some time; others are more recent discoveries.
Reading only somewhat between the lines of the paper, modern knowledge of neuroplasticity suggests that at least some of the neural connections – in some patients – can be at least partially restored with a combination of medication (largely to calm the pt long enough to make the following possible) and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy known from scan research to be associated with such re-connectivity.
A number of medicinally stabilized, chornically psychotic patients have already demonstrated rehabilitation of social cognition via the use of the following (and other) psychotherapies: