Social cognitive dysfunction as a clinical marker: A systematic review of meta-analyses across 30 clinical conditions

Abstract

Social cognition includes a range of cognitive processes that help individuals to understand how others think and feel. There is emerging evidence that social cognitive deficits may represent a transdiagnostic issue, potentially serving as a marker of neurological abnormality. We performed an electronic database search in order to identify published, peer-reviewed meta-analyses that compared facial emotion recognition or theory of mind task performance between individuals meeting clinical criteria for a psychiatric, neurological or developmental condition against healthy controls. We identified 31 meta-analyses eligible for inclusion that examined performance across relevant tasks among 30 different clinical populations. The results suggest that social cognitive deficits appear to be a core cognitive phenotype of many clinical conditions. Across the clinical 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. There is a need to clarify the 'real world' impact of these deficits, and to develop effective transdiagnostic interventions for those individuals that are adversely affected.

Social Cognition and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Review of Subdomains of Social Functioning

“…The observed bias of OCD patients to assign more negative valence to faces may well be related to comorbid mood disturbances as this is something also commonly found in depression (64). Likewise, problems with mentalizing and altered emotion experience and regulation have been reported in many other disorders as well (153,154). Importantly, only a subset of the reviewed studies included comorbid diagnoses or symptoms as covariate in their analysis or considered the presence of comorbidities as an exclusion criterion (see Tables 1-3).…”

“…The extent to which observed social cognitive deficits are specific to OCD or can be seen as more transdiagnostic deficits that contribute to psychopathology in general should also be investigated in more detail. For example, a recent meta-analysis of 30 different clinical disorders demonstrated social cognitive deficits across practically all these disorders (153). A more FIGURE 2 | Overview of symptoms and processes of obsessive-compulsive disorder discussed in this review (A), from an individual context via a social observational and finally toward an interactive context, as well as hypothesized brain regions primarily implicated in these social alterations based on the current review (B).…”

Emotional recognition training modifies neural response to emotional faces but does not improve mood in healthy volunteers with high levels of depressive symptoms

“…Understanding emotional signals is critical to successful social functioning but is disrupted in many psychiatric disorders (Cotter, Granger, Backx, Hobbs, Looi & Barnett, 2018). Negative processing biases in depression predict relapse in currently depressed and remitted patients, suggesting that these biases play a role in the onset and maintenance of depression.…”

Dissociating Profiles of Social Cognitive Disturbances Between Mixed Personality and Anxiety Disorder

“…Disturbances to interpersonal functioning are recognized increasingly as a characteristic symptom of many psychiatric conditions, particularly personality disorders (PD; Schilbach, 2016;Cotter et al, 2018). This is reflected in the redefinition of personality pathology in the most recent version of the ; in addition to impairments in cognition, affectivity and impulse control, interpersonal dysfunction is considered a primary manifestation of personality pathologies (Hopwood et al, 2013).…”

“…Research into these socio-cognitive abilities in PD have begun to reveal impairments in many diagnostic groups. This includes disturbances in the discrimination of emotional facial expressions in Narcissistic (Marissen et al, 2012), Antisocial (Zhang et al, 2016) and Borderline PD (Berenson et al, 2018); reduced imitative control in Borderline PD (Hauschild et al, 2018); an inability to accurately infer the mental states of others in Narcissistic (Bilotta et al, 2018) and Avoidant PD (Moroni et al, 2016); subtle alterations in empathic awareness and expression in Obsessive-Compulsive (Cain et al, 2015) and Narcissistic PD (Baskin-Sommers et al, 2014); and differential patterns of dysfunctional emotion regulation among all Cluster A, B and C diagnoses (Borges and Naugle, 2017; for reviews on social cognition, see Herpertz and Bertsch, 2014;Cotter et al, 2018). Interestingly, in Borderline PD these impairments have been attributed to dysfunctional self-other distinction (Beeney et al, 2016).…”