Existing research shows that individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ) show substantial deficits in social cognitive domains, including facial emotion recognition (FER), empathy, and Theory of Mind (ToM). Their exact relationship with the different dimensions included in the “Clinician- Rated Dimensions of Psychosis Symptom Severity” of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) remains unexplored.

To investigate the relationship between different social cognition dimensions and the dimensions of psychosis included in the DSM-5.

Fifty-eight outpatients with stable SCZ completed the Intention-Inferencing Task (IIT), a non-verbal ToM task and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE). They also completed a newly developed and validated FER task constructed from photographs of the face of a famous Tunisian actress and evaluating the ability to correctly identify Ekman's six basic facial emotions. The clinician-rated dimensions of psychosis symptom severity was used to evaluate 8 dimensions of psychosis.

The patients presenting higher cognitive empathy capacities had less present abnormal psychomotor behaviour scores (P = 0.05). Higher levels of affective empathy were correlated to lower present delusions score (P = 0.037). Better scores in the IIT were correlated to less present negative scores (P = 0.013) and less impaired cognition scores (P = 0.009). FER task score didn’t correlated with any clinical dimension.

Our results suggest the existence of specific relationships between social cognition dimensions and psychosis dimensions. Further studies are needed to confirm these relationships.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.