The Functional Significance of Affect Recognition, Neurocognition, and Clinical Symptoms in Schizophrenia

OBJECTIVES: The complex relationship and exact extent of the contribution of plausible indictors to social functional outcome in schizophrenia remain unclear. The present study aimed to explore the functional significance of clinical symptoms, neurocognition, and affect recognition simultaneously in schizophrenia. METHODS: The clinical symptoms, basic neurocognition, facial emotion recognition, and social functioning of 154 subjects, including 74 with schizophrenia and 80 nonclinical comparisons, were assessed. RESULTS: We observed that various subdomains of social functioning were extensively related to general intelligence, basic neurocognition, facial emotion recognition, and clinical symptoms, with different association patterns. Multivariate regression analyses revealed that years of education, age, sustained attention, working memory, and facial emotion recognition were significantly associated with global social functioning in schizophrenia. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that affect recognition combined with nonsocial neurocognition demonstrated a crucial role in predicting global social function in schizophrenia.