中国科学院心理研究所机构知识库

This study investigates whether social cognitive deficits found in patients with schizophrenia are specific to social threat stimuli, and whether the deficits increase across the delusion spectrum from a subclinical sample to clinical manifestation. The authors presented the meta-analytic review of the published literature on social threat perception performance in three kinds of group comparisons: a subclinical group and a healthy control group, a schizophrenia group and a healthy control group, and a schizophrenia with delusion symptoms group and a healthy control group. The meta-analysis of 20 studies yielded six weighted effect sizes. The largest differences were found between the schizophrenia with delusion group and the healthy controls in both the threat and non-threat conditions. No differences were found between the effect sizes in the threat-related condition and the non-threat condition in any of the three group comparisons. Age was found to be significantly correlated with the effect sizes. The performance differences in both the threat and non-threat conditions reflect a generalized performance deficit, rather than a specific deficit, in the perception of social threat stimuli among patients with schizophrenia. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers' constructive comments to the versions of the manuscript. The study was partially supported by the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-R-131), and grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30770723) and the National Basic Research Programme (973 Programme No. 2007CB512302) to Raymond Chan.