Skip to main content
A Singapore Government Agency Website How to identify
Official website links end with .gov.sg
Government agencies communicate via .gov.sg websites (e.g. go.gov.sg/open). Trusted websites
Secure websites use HTTPS
Look for a lock () or https:// as an added precaution. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
PREDICT
IMH Publication

Comparative study of emotion recognition and theory of mind between MDD and Schizophrenia

1 December 2021

Patients with schizophrenia show greater social cognitive deficits than those with major depressive disorder. Read this study comparing emotion recognition and theory of mind across both conditions and healthy controls.

This article has been migrated from an earlier version of the site and may display formatting inconsistencies.

Comparative study of emotion recognition and theory of mind between major depressive disorder and schizophrenia

Keane Lim, Zixu Yang, Nur Amirah Abdul Rashid, Bhing Leet Tan, Justin Dauwels, Jimmy Lee

Background: Social cognition as a transdiagnostic construct between major depressive disorder (MDD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) is not well understood. This may be attributed to the variability of social cognitive measures indexing the same construct. This study aims to compare emotion recognition and theory of mind domains, known to be impaired in SCZ, between MDD and SCZ.

Methods: Three groups of participants (NTotal = 150) were enrolled in this study: MDD (n = 51), SCZ (n = 50) and healthy controls (HC; n = 49). Emotion recognition was assessed on the Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT) and Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER40); theory of mind was measured on The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). Mixed ANCOVAs were utilised to compare social cognitive performance across the groups.

Results: SCZ performed poorer in all 3 social cognition tasks compared to both MDD and HC. No statistically significant difference in social cognitive performance was observed between MDD and HC.

Conclusions: This study serves as an effort towards employing the same standardised social cognitive measures for direct comparison of performance patterns across diagnostic groups. Future work is needed to extend this in larger samples of different illness severity and diagnostic categories.

Keywords: Emotion recognition; Major depressive disorder; Schizophrenia; Social cognition; Theory of mind.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.09.023

Back to top