The puzzle of quality of life in schizophrenia: putting the pieces together with the FACE-SZ cohort.

BACKGROUND: The determinants of quality of life (QoL) in schizophrenia are largely debated, mainly due to methodological discrepancies and divergence about the concepts concerned. As most studies have investigated bi- or tri-variate models, a multivariate model accounting for simultaneous potential mediations is necessary to have a comprehensive view of the determinants of QOL. We sought to estimate the associations between cognitive reserve, cognition, functioning, insight, depression, schizophrenic symptoms, and QoL in schizophrenia and their potential mediation relationships. METHODS: We used structural equation modeling with mediation analyses to test a model based on existing literature in a sample of 776 patients with schizophrenia from the FondaMental Foundation FACE-SZ cohort. RESULTS: Our model showed a good fit to the data. We found better functioning to be positively associated with a better QoL, whereas better cognition, better insight, higher levels of depression, and schizophrenic symptoms were associated with a lower QoL in our sample. Cognitive reserve is not directly linked to QoL, but indirectly in a negative manner via cognition. We confirm the negative relationship between cognition and subjective QoL which was previously evidenced by other studies; moreover, this relationship seems to be robust as it survived in our multivariate model. It was not explained by insight as some suggested, thus the mechanism at stake remains to be explained. CONCLUSION: The pathways to subjective QoL in schizophrenia are complex and the determinants largely influence each other. Longitudinal studies are warranted to confirm these cross-sectional findings.

Relationship between neurocognition and theory of mind as a function of symptomatic profile in schizophrenia: results from the national FACE-SZ cohort.

INTRODUCTION: Deficits in theory of mind (ToM) can vary depending on the predominant schizophrenia symptoms, and though most neurocognitive functions are involved in ToM, all may not be associated with the same symptoms. With consideration to the relationships between symptoms, neurocognition and ToM, the aim of the present study is to identify the neurocognitive functions influencing ToM capacities according to symptomatic profile. METHODS: The study is based on a sample of 124 adults with schizophrenia from a French national cohort. Patients were divided into two groups according to their scores on the five Wallwork factors of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale using hierarchical clustering before carrying out multivariable analyses. RESULTS: The "disorganised group" (n = 89) showed high scores on the disorganised factor, and had a ToM associated with reasoning, visual recognition and speed of processing. The "positive group" (n = 35) showed high scores on the positive and depressive factors, and had a ToM associated with working memory. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that neurocognitive predictors of ToM in schizophrenia are different according to the predominant clinical dimension, thus refining our knowledge of the relationship between symptoms, neurocognition and ToM, and acknowledging their status as important predictors of patients' functional status.

Longitudinal relationships between cognition and functioning over 2 years in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder: a cross-lagged panel model approach with the FACE-BD cohort.

BACKGROUND: Longitudinal studies of the relationship between cognition and functioning in bipolar disorder are scarce, although cognition is thought to be a key determinant of functioning. The causal structure between cognition and psychosocial functioning in bipolar disorder is unknown. AIMS: We sought to examine the direction of causality between cognitive performance and functional outcome over 2 years in a large cohort of euthymic patients with bipolar disorder. METHOD: The sample consisted of 272 adults diagnosed with bipolar disorder who were euthymic at baseline, 12 and 24 months. All participants were recruited via the FondaMental Advanced Centers of Expertise in Bipolar Disorders. We used a battery of tests, assessing six domains of cognition at baseline and 24 months. Residual depressive symptoms and psychosocial functioning were measured at baseline and 12 and 24 months. The possible causal structure between cognition and psychosocial functioning was investigated with cross-lagged panel models with residual depressive symptoms as a covariate. RESULTS: The analyses support a causal model in which cognition moderately predicts and is causally primary to functional outcome 1 year later, whereas psychosocial functioning does not predict later cognitive performance. Subthreshold depressive symptoms concurrently affected functioning at each time of measure. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are compatible with an upward causal effect of cognition on functional outcome in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder. Neuropsychological assessment may help specify individual prognoses. Further studies are warranted to confirm this causal link and evaluate cognitive remediation, before or simultaneously with functional remediation, as an intervention to improve functional outcome.

Assessing metacognitive and help-seeking strategies in schizophrenia: design and psychometric validation of the Versailles Metacognitive Strategies Evaluation Questionnaire.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to design a questionnaire, the Versailles Metacognitive Strategies Evaluation Questionnaire, for assessing the use of metacognitive and help-seeking strategies in three key-domains of impaired daily functioning in schizophrenia. To evaluate its psychometric properties (internal consistency, factor structure, convergent and divergent validity, and stability). DESIGN: Development of a questionnaire and psychometric validation procedure in patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy controls. Stability over one year was assessed in the patient group. SETTING: Schizophrenia Centers of Expertise (French FondaMental Network). SUBJECTS: A total of 141 patients with schizophrenia, among whom 77 participated in the second evaluation; 97 healthy subjects. MAIN MEASURES: The Versailles Metacognitive Strategies Evaluation Questionnaire, Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale, Personal and Social Performance Scale, Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia Scale, Schizophrenia Quality of Life Questionnaire, and Stages of Recovery Instrument. RESULTS: From the 36-items version, stepwise exploratory factor analysis (oblimin) produced a 25-items scale which had a 3-factors structure (hygiene concern, social relationships, and hygiene help-seeking). Cronbach's were respectively equal to 0.91, 0.82, and 0.78. One-year stability was good (intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.7). The three factors showed good convergent validity with measures of quality of life (rho = 0.34, P ⩽ 0.001). The first two factors correlated with recovery (N = 34, rho = 0.53, P ⩽ 0.001). On the contrary, the factors exhibited divergent validity, with no significant correlation, with symptoms and cognitive and psychosocial functioning (P > 0.05). Factor structure in healthy controls did not match with that of patients, all items but one were found significantly different among groups. CONCLUSION: The Versailles Metacognitive Strategies Evaluation Questionnaire provides a simple and valid means to assess metacognitive strategies in individuals with schizophrenia.

Screening for cognitive deficits with the Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia scale.

OBJECTIVE:: This study aimed to evaluate the validity of the Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia scale (ECPDS) to discriminate for cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. DESIGN:: This multicentre cross-sectional study used a validation design with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. SETTINGS:: The study was undertaken in a French network of seven outward referral centres. SUBJECTS:: We recruited individuals with clinically stable schizophrenia diagnosed based on the Structured Clinical Interview for assessing Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., rev.; DSM-IV-R) criteria. MAIN MEASURES:: The index test for cognitive impairment was ECPDS (independent variable), a 13-item scale completed by a relative of the participant. The reference standard was a standardized test battery that evaluated seven cognitive domains. Cognitive impairment was the dependent variable and was defined as an average z-score more than 1 SD below the normative mean in two or more cognitive domains. RESULTS:: Overall, 97 patients were included (67 with schizophrenia, 28 with schizoaffective disorder, and 2 with schizophreniform disorder). The mean age was 30.2 (SD 7.7) years, and there were 75 men (77.3%). There were 59 (60.8%) patients with cognitive impairment on the neuropsychological battery, and the mean ECPDS score was 27.3 (SD 7.3). The ROC curve analysis showed that the optimal ECPDS cut-off was 29.5. The area under the curve was 0.77, with 76.3% specificity and 71.1% sensitivity to discriminate against cognitive impairment. CONCLUSION:: The ECPDS is a valid triage tool for detecting cognitive impairment in schizophrenia, before using an extensive neuropsychological battery, and holds promise for use in everyday clinical practice.

Treatment of social cognition impairments in patients with traumatic brain injury: a critical review.

Objective: The aim of this study is to review published research on treatment of social cognition impairments in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).Methods: Following the PRISMA guidelines, a PubMed literature search was conducted, followed by a manual search in recently published papers. Main criteria for selection were that patients had sustained a TBI, and that social cognition was the main target of treatment. A total of 16 papers and three reviews were selected and included in the present review.Results: Five studies (including three randomized controlled trials (RCT)) addressed facial affect recognition, one study specifically addressed emotional prosody, two RCTs used a combination of treatment strategies addressing social perception deficits. Six studies, including two RCTs, addressed social communication skills or theory of mind. Finally, two RCTs reported the effectiveness of a more global approach, addressing multiple domains of social cognition, such as emotion perception, social skills training, and theory of mind.Discussion/conclusion: Although there has been much less research on treatment of social cognition in patients with TBI as compared with psychiatric conditions, the findings reported in the present review are encouraging. Further multicenter large-scale RCTs are needed, with special emphasis on the generalization of treatment effects to social skills in everyday life.

Eye-tracking reveals a slowdown of social context processing during intention attribution in patients with schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia is associated with poor theory of mind (ToM), particularly in the attribution of intentions to others. It is also associated with abnormal gaze behaviours and contextual processing. This study investigated to what extent impaired ToM in patients with schizophrenia is related to abnormal processing of social context. METHODS: We evaluated ToM using a nonverbal intention attribution task based on comic strips depicting social/nonsocial and contextual/noncontextual events while eye movements were recorded. Eye-tracking was used to assess processing time dedicated to visual cues contained in regions of interest identified in a pilot study. We measured cognitive contextual control on a separate task. RESULTS: We tested 29 patients with schizophrenia and 29 controls. Compared with controls, patients were slower in intention attribution but not in physical reasoning. They looked longer than controls at contextual cues displayed in the first 2 context pictures of the comic strips, and this difference was greater for intention attribution than for physical reasoning. We found no group difference in time spent looking at noncontextual cues. Patients' impairment in contextual control did not explain their increased reaction time and gaze duration on contextual cues during intention attribution. LIMITATIONS: Difficulty may not have been equivalent between intention attribution and physical reasoning conditions. CONCLUSION: Overall, schizophrenia was characterized by a delay in intention attribution related to a slowdown of social context processing that was not explained by worse executive contextual control.

Comparative analysis of anticholinergic burden scales to explain iatrogenic cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: results from the multicenter FACE-SZ cohort.

Aim: The anticholinergic properties of medications are associated with poorer cognitive performance in schizophrenia. Numerous scales have been developed to assess anticholinergic burden and yet, there is no consensus indicating which anticholinergic burden scale is more relevant for patients with schizophrenia. We aimed to identify valid scales for estimating the risk of iatrogenic cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. Methods: We identified 27 scales in a literature review. The responses to neuropsychological tests of 839 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder in the FACE-SZ database were collected between 2010 and 2021. We estimated the association between objective global cognitive performance and the 27 scales, the number of psychotropic drugs, and chlorpromazine and lorazepam equivalents in bivariable regressions in a cross-sectional design. We then adjusted the bivariable models with covariates: the predictors significantly associated with cognitive performance in multiple linear regressions were considered to have good concurrent validity to assess cognitive performance. Results: Eight scales, the number of psychotropic drugs, and drug equivalents were significantly associated with cognitive impairment. The number of psychotropic drugs, the most convenient predictor to compute, was associated with worse executive function (Standardized ß = -0.12, p = .004) and reasoning (Standardized ß = -0.08, p = .037). Conclusion: Anticholinergic burden, the number of psychotropic drugs, and drug equivalents were weakly associated with cognition, thus suggesting that cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder is explained by factors other than medication. The number of psychotropic drugs was the most parsimonious method to assess the risk of iatrogenic cognitive impairment.

Relationships between neuropsychological performance, insight, medication adherence, and social metacognition in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Social metacognition is still poorly understood in schizophrenia, particularly its neuropsychological basis and its impact on insight and medication adherence. We therefore quantified social metacognition as the agreement between objective and subjective mentalization and assessed its correlates in a sample of individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. METHODS: Participants consisted of 143 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders who underwent a metacognitive version of a mentalization task, an extensive neuropsychological battery, and a clinical evaluation to assess their insight into illness and medication adherence. We studied potential interactions between confidence judgments and several neuropsychological and clinical variables on mentalization accuracy with mixed-effects multiple logistic regressions. RESULTS: Confidence judgments were closely associated with mentalization accuracy, indicative of good social metacognition in this task. Working memory, visual memory, and reasoning and problem-solving were the three neuropsychological dimensions positively associated with metacognition. By contrast, the two measures of medication adherence were associated with poorer metacognition, whereas no association was found between metacognition and clinical insight. The multiple regression model showed a significant positive impact of better working memory, older age at onset, longer duration of hospitalization, and worse medication adherence on social metacognition. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss possible mechanisms underlying the apparent association between social metacognition and working memory. Adherence should be monitored when remediating social metacognition, and psychoeducation should be given to patients with a high level of awareness of their capacity to mentalize.

Anatomical and temporal architecture of theory of mind: a MEG insight into the early stages.

Representation of others' actions and mental states leads to the activation of several brain networks: the mentalizing and the "mirror neuron" systems as well as a "low level" social perception component. However, respective activations of the regions belonging to these networks remain unknown with respect to chronometrical data when static drawing stimuli are presented. To determine anatomical and temporal characteristics of theory of mind processes, magnetic signals were measured in 21 subjects during a validated nonverbal attribution of intentions task. Minimum norm estimation provides chronometric and localization data showing that regions known to be involved in the mentalizing, "mirror neuron" and social perception networks have simultaneous activations between 100 and 700 ms post-stimulus, a period which may be thought as corresponding to early stages of social processes. Among some regions, different profiles as well as modulations regarding experimental conditions suggest functional distinctions between these structures, pleading for a cooperative nature of these networks. While the left temporo-parietal area and superior temporal sulcus seem more specialized in social cues coding, we demonstrate that their right homologues, as well as the right inferior parietal cortex, are preferentially recruited during attribution of intentions stimuli compared to scenarios based on physical causality from 200 to 600 ms.

The study of social cognition with neuroimaging methods as a means to explore future directions of deficit evaluation in schizophrenia?

This article discusses the important advances in a recent field of science dealing with the brain processes implicated in understanding social situations and interacting with others. Many behavioral studies on schizophrenia have shown the impairment of these processes and their preferential relation with disorganization and negative syndromes. Brain imaging is a powerful method to identify brain systems participating in these processes in healthy subjects and will be used increasingly to study mental disorders such as schizophrenia. A few preliminary studies have opened this field of research and allowed for the drawing of some limited conclusions. We emphasize the importance of developing an integrated neurocognitive framework to account for the multifaceted nature of social cognition deficits in schizophrenia. Inspired by contemporary models of empathy and social cognition that identify different components such as shared representation, mentalizing, self/other distinction, we show how schizophrenia affects these components at the behavioral and functional levels. We also outline the interest of this model to understand putative abnormalities of contextual integration within the area of mentalization. Finally, we discuss how specialized measures of brain functions during the performance of these precisely defined mental processes might be used as outcome predictors.

Exploring Clinical Correlates of Metacognition in Bipolar Disorders Using Moderation Analyses: The Role of Antipsychotics.

The determinants of metacognition are still poorly understood in bipolar disorders (BD). We aimed to examine the clinical determinants of metacognition, defined as the agreement between objective and subjective cognition in individuals with BD. The participants consisted of 281 patients with BD who underwent an extensive neuropsychological battery and clinical evaluation. To assess subjective cognition, participants provided a general rating of their estimated cognitive difficulties. Clinical characteristics of BD were also recorded, along with medication. We studied the potential moderation of the association between cognitive complaints and global objective cognitive performance by several clinical variables with ordinal logistic regressions. Depression and impulsivity were associated with greater cognitive complaints. The only variable that moderated the relationship between objective and subjective cognition in the global model was the prescription of antipsychotics. Patients taking antipsychotics had a poorer association between cognitive complaints and objective neuropsychological performance. This result suggests a role for dopamine in the modulation of metacognitive performance, and calls for the systematic control of antipsychotic medication in future studies documenting metacognitive deficits in severe and persistent mental disorders. Depression and impulsivity should be investigated as potential therapeutic targets for individuals with BD and cognitive complaints, before proposing an extensive neuropsychological evaluation.

Outcome prediction with a social cognitive battery: a multicenter longitudinal study.

The interest in social cognition in schizophrenia is justified by the relationship between deficits in these skills and negative functional outcomes. Although assessment batteries have already been described, there is no consensus about which measures are useful in predicting patient functioning or quality of life (QoL). We investigated a set of five measures of recognition of facial emotions, theory of mind (ToM), and empathy in a cohort of 143 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder at inclusion and, amongst whom 79 were reassessed 1 year later. The distribution was satisfactory for the TREF (Facial Emotion Recognition Task), V-SIR (Versailles-Situational Intention Reading), and QCAE (Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy). Internal consistency was satisfactory for the TREF, V-SIR, V-Comics (Versailles Intention Attribution Task), and QCAE. Sensitivity to change was acceptable for the TREF. The TREF and V-SIR showed a cross-sectional relationship with functioning beyond the clinical symptoms of schizophrenia but not beyond neurocognition. Moreover, the TREF and V-SIR at inclusion could not predict functioning one year later, whereas most neurocognitive and clinical dimensions at inclusion could. Finally, only affective QCAE showed a significant cross-sectional, but not longitudinal, association with QoL. In conclusion, the TREF had satisfactory psychometric properties and showed a cross-sectional, but not longitudinal, association with objective outcome measures, thus appearing to be reliable in clinical practice and research. The V-SIR also showed promising psychometric properties, despite a possible weakness to detect change. However, these measures should be interpreted within the context of the good predictive power of the neurocognitive and clinical status on the outcome.

Brain Processes While Struggling With Evidence Accumulation During Facial Emotion Recognition: An ERP Study.

The human brain is tuned to recognize emotional facial expressions in faces having a natural upright orientation. The relative contributions of featural, configural, and holistic processing to decision-making are as yet poorly understood. This study used a diffusion decision model (DDM) of decision-making to investigate the contribution of early face-sensitive processes to emotion recognition from physiognomic features (the eyes, nose, and mouth) by determining how experimental conditions tapping those processes affect early face-sensitive neuroelectric reflections (P100, N170, and P250) of processes determining evidence accumulation at the behavioral level. We first examined the effects of both stimulus orientation (upright vs. inverted) and stimulus type (photographs vs. sketches) on behavior and neuroelectric components (amplitude and latency). Then, we explored the sources of variance common to the experimental effects on event-related potentials (ERPs) and the DDM parameters. Several results suggest that the N170 indicates core visual processing for emotion recognition decision-making: (a) the additive effect of stimulus inversion and impoverishment on N170 latency; and (b) multivariate analysis suggesting that N170 neuroelectric activity must be increased to counteract the detrimental effects of face inversion on drift rate and of stimulus impoverishment on the stimulus encoding component of non-decision times. Overall, our results show that emotion recognition is still possible even with degraded stimulation, but at a neurocognitive cost, reflecting the extent to which our brain struggles to accumulate sensory evidence of a given emotion. Accordingly, we theorize that: (a) the P100 neural generator would provide a holistic frame of reference to the face percept through categorical encoding; (b) the N170 neural generator would maintain the structural cohesiveness of the subtle configural variations in facial expressions across our experimental manipulations through coordinate encoding of the facial features; and (c) building on the previous configural processing, the neurons generating the P250 would be responsible for a normalization process adapting to the facial features to match the stimulus to internal representations of emotional expressions.

Quantitative assessment of attribution of intentions to others in schizophrenia using an ecological video-based task: a comparison with manic and depressed patients.

Schizophrenia is characterized by the impairment of several facets of social cognition. This has been demonstrated in numerous studies that focused on specific aspects of social cognition such as the attribution of intentions, emotions, or false beliefs to others. However, most of these studies relied on complex verbal descriptions or impoverished social stimuli. In the present study, we evaluated a new task (Versailles-Situational Intention Reading, V-SIR) that is based on video excerpts depicting complex real-life scenes of social interactions. Subjects were required to rate the probabilities of several affirmations of the intentions of one of the characters. The V-SIR task was administered to schizophrenic patients (N=15), depressed patients (N=12), manic patients (N=15), and healthy controls (N=15). The performance of schizophrenic patients was significantly impaired in comparison to healthy and depressed subjects. There was a trend toward a significant difference between schizophrenic and manic patients. Manic patients also demonstrated impaired performance relative to healthy subjects. Schizophrenic patients' V-SIR scores were significantly correlated with their scores on another attribution of intentions task that used comic strips. These results show that tasks based on more ecological stimuli are powerful enough to detect theory-of-mind abnormalities in pathological populations such as schizophrenic patients.

Modeling the Longitudinal Effects of Insight on Depression, Quality of Life and Suicidality in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: Results from the FACE-SZ Cohort.

BACKGROUND: Up to half of the patients with schizophrenia attempt suicide during their lifetime. Better insight is associated with better functioning but also with increased suicidality. The direction of the relationship between insight and suicidality is not clear, hence we aimed to provide new elements using structural equation modeling. METHODS: Insight, quality of life (QoL), depression, and suicidality were measured at baseline and at 12 months in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The relationships between these variables were investigated by latent difference score models, controlling for chlorpromazine doses, positive and negative symptoms, and general psychopathology. RESULTS: 738 patients were included, and 370 completed the study. Baseline levels of insight predicted changes in suicidality, whereas baseline levels of suicidality did not predict changes in insight, suggesting that better insight underlies suicidality and predicts its worsening. Our results suggest this temporal sequence: better insight → worse QoL → increased depression → increased suicidality, while insight also affects the three variables in parallel. CONCLUSION: Better insight predicts a worsening of QoL, depression and suicidality. These findings contribute to our global understanding of the longitudinal influence of insight on suicidality. We advocate that insight-targeted interventions should not be proposed without the monitoring of depression and suicide prevention.

Confirmation of a Two-Factor Solution to the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy in a French Population of Patients With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders.

The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) is a tool for self-assessing the cognitive and emotional components of empathy. A study showed that a two-factor model fits the data of patients with schizophrenia, whereas other reports on healthy subjects have suggested a five-factor decomposition. We aimed to replicate the model of Horan et al. in a French population with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (i.e., schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders) participating in the EVACO Study (NCT02901015). In total, 133 patients were assessed with the QCAE, the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS), the Personal and Social Performance Scale (PSP), and the Self rating Quality of Life Scale (S-QoL). The two-factor model demonstrated an adequate fit with the data, comparable to that reported by Horan et al. Males scored higher on the Affective subscore than females. After correction for multiple tests, psychopathology (PANSS) and functioning (PSP) did not correlate significantly with the QCAE subscores. However, quality of life (S-QoL) correlated positively with the Emotional Contagion subscore. Thus, the variability of empathetic disposition in schizophrenia may be considered through the cognitive versus affective dichotomy and properly investigated with the QCAE. The results support further investigation of the relationship between QCAE scores and subjective outcome measurements, such as quality of life, and emphasize the importance of cross-cultural comparisons.

Psychiatric disability as mediator of the neurocognition-functioning link in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: SEM analysis using the Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia (ECPDS) scale.

The functional outcome in schizophrenia spectrum disorders is affected by multiple factors such as cognitive performance and clinical symptoms. Psychiatric disability may be another important determinant of functional outcome. The purpose of this study was to test whether schizophrenia symptoms and psychiatric disability mediated the association between cognition and functioning. Between April 2013 and July 2017, we included 108 community-dwelling adults with stable schizophrenia spectrum disorder in a multicenter study. Psychiatric disability was assessed with the Evaluation of Cognitive Processes involved in Disability in Schizophrenia (ECPDS) scale by relatives of patients. ECPDS focused on the broad array of motivational, neurocognitive, sociocognitive, and metacognitive impairments that result in activity restrictions. We used a battery of tests to assess seven cognition domains (processing speed, attention/vigilance, working, verbal and visual memory, reasoning and problem solving, and executive functioning) and cross-sectional structural equation modeling (SEM) for the mediation analyses. We estimated the one-year temporal stability of ECPDS scores in 45 participants. The model provided showed good fit and explained 43.9% of the variance in functioning. The effect of neurocognition on functioning was fully mediated by symptoms (proportion mediated: 36.5%) and psychiatric disability (proportion mediated: 31.3%). The ECPDS score had acceptable one-year temporal stability. The ECPDS scale has satisfactory psychometric properties, and shows significant convergence with neurocognition and functioning, suggesting a role for this tool in the routine evaluation of cognitive remediation needs. Our model validates psychiatric disability as a crucial step from cognitive impairment to restricted participation in life situations.

Is the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy measuring two or five dimensions? Evidence in a French sample.

Although many instruments measure empathy, most of them focus on specific facets (e.g., Spreng et al., 2009) or specific contexts (e.g. Wang et al., 2003) of empathy. For this reason, the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE; Reniers et al., 2011) was recently built to grasp the general construct of empathy through its Affective-Cognitive duality, although not providing clear-cut results about the bidimensionality of the scale. In this study, Confirmatory Factor Analyses were conducted on the responses of 418 adults on the French QCAE (backtranslated for this study). A total of 8 models were tested - including the models of the original investigation. The 5-correlated factors model had the best fit, and the pattern of correlations between the factors did not support the Cognitive-Affective distinction. The QCAE is discussed as showing signs of psychometrical robustness, but also as a tool that is more 5-dimensional than bidimensional.

Social brain dysfunctions in schizophrenia: a review of neuroimaging studies.

Several studies have indicated that schizophrenic patients show impaired performance in various aspects of social cognition, including theory of mind, emotion processing, and agency judgments. Neuroimaging studies that have compared patients and healthy subjects during such mental activity indicate an abnormal hemodynamic response in the medial prefrontal cortex, the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the inferior parietal lobe, i.e., a set of regions known to be critically involved in social cognition. This paper addresses a number of issues raised by schizophrenia research into theory of mind, emotion perception and self-agency with regards to the neural systems that mediate social cognition. In healthy subjects, typical brain patterns are associated with theory of mind, emotion perception and self-agency; some activated clusters overlap, while others are distinct. For instance, activations in the paracingulate gyrus are almost systematically associated with theory of mind tasks, while the amygdala is mainly involved in emotion perception tasks. Additional foci are frequently found activated during those tasks: superior temporal sulcus, inferior frontal area. Moreover, the inferior parietal lobe is thought to contribute to agency judgments. In the light of the data on brain abnormalities and neurochemical dysfunctions in schizophrenia, we discuss the interaction of social cognitive dysfunction with the supposed information processing abnormalities caused by dopamine dysregulation.