Gender Differences in Social Cognition in Patients With Schizophrenia of Recent Diagnosis and Healthy Controls Subjects

Individuals with schizophrenia have important and persistent deficits in multiple neurocognitive domains as well as in the Social Cognition (SC). SC refers to the mental operations underlying social behavior, and it is understood as a multidimensional construct that comprises emotional processing (EP), social perspective and knowledge, attributional bias and theory of mind (ToM) or mentalizing. Mentalizing and EP skills have been the two most studied subdomains of SC in schizophrenia. Both domains have been found to be impaired in chronic schizophrenia patients as well as in patients in early stages of the illness. In this context, although negative symptoms may play and important role, females seem to perform better than males in ToM and EP tasks, suggesting the presence of gender differences in the SC skills in patients with schizophrenia. However, to our knowledge, there are no studies that have explored the gender-related differences between cognitive and affective ToM and its relationship with the EP performance in schizophrenia patients of recent diagnosis comparing with healthy subjects. In this line, the main objective of this project is to analyze the influence of gender in the cognitive and affective ToM abilities, in a group of patients with schizophrenia in early stages of the illness comparing with healthy subjects. Secondarily, this study pretends to explore the association between EP skills and affective ToM tasks performance in males and females with and without recent diagnosis of schizophrenia.