Social cognition in Autism and Schizophrenia : what differences ?

Léa Riou, Marie Descroix, Audrey Le Quilleuc

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia disorders (SSD) share some symptomatology and neurodevelopmental impairments, such as social cognition impairment. Social cognition refers to several related functions such as the ability to perceive basic emotions, social orientation, the ability to perceive social cues, the ability to perceive complex social judgments, the attribution of mental states, and the theory of mind. These disorders could be placed on a dimensional continuum ranging from inferences about mental status that are insufficient in the case of ASDs to mental attributions that are excessive in the case of SSDs.

Researchers have studied social cognition in these two populations. They hypothesized that there would be a continuum in performance on social cognition tasks, with the group of schizophrenic participants being an intermediary between the group of autistic participants (poor performance) and the group of healthy participants (good performance). On the other hand, the group of participants with schizophrenia should show a tendency to over-mentalize while the group of participants with autism should show a tendency to under-mentalize.

To do so, they recruited 70 healthy people, 42 people with ASD and 35 people with SSD from two public hospitals.These authors used four types of measures: the MASC test (Dziobek et al. 2006) that assesses social cognition on a continuum that means from the deductions on mental state which are insufficient to those that are excessive ; The Strange Stories Task of Happé (Happe 1994; Pousa 2002) that involves inferring thoughts, emotions and intentions from stories ; The Hinting Task Test (Corcoran et al. 1995; Gil et al. 2012) that consists in spotting allusions in short stories ; and The Frith Happé Animations (White et al. 2011) that consists in answering multiple-choice questions about animations of theory of mind.

Results show that participants with ASDs and participants with SSDs performed worse than healthy participants on all social cognition tasks. Also the authors found that the ASD and SSD groups had similar errors in terms of over-, under-, and no mentalization. When comparing the clinical groups to the healthy control group, both patient groups showed a significantly lower percentage of over- and under-mentalization errors, and the SSD group also showed a higher percentage of under-mentalization errors. In general, the results show a similar amount of social cognitive deficits in SSD and ASD. These contradictory findings with previous studies, may due to the construct of the study (e.g., sample size, age and IQ). So, further research is needed to understand the processes underlying social cognition.

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