The current project consists of a series of studies to examine the prevalence rate of neurological soft signs (NSS) in different stages of schizophrenia, the underlying relationship between neurological soft signs (NSS) and neurocognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, and neural basis of NSS in first-episode schizophrenia patients and their non-psychotic first-degree relatives. First, we have quantified the magnitudes of impairments of NSS in patients with schizophrenia and found the effect sizes were extremely large (d ranges from 0.8-1.7), and the associations between NSS and neurocognitive functions were modest to moderate(d ranges from 0.3-0.5). Moreover, another meta-analysis also demonstrated that NSS differences yielded a mean effect size of 0.81 for schizophrenia patients and their non-psychotic relatives and 0.97 for non-psychotic relatives of patients and healthy controls. These two meta-analyses show that there are large group differences in NSS prevalence between schizophrenia, non-psychotic relatives, and healthy controls. Moreover, our behavioural data on 64 at-risk individuals with schizotypal personality features and 51 healthy controls also showed that the at-risk individuals demonstrated significantly higher prevalence of NSS than healthy controls. These findin
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