Can antipsychotics improve social cognition in patients with schizophrenia?

Social cognition is described as the higher mental processes that are engaged while people store, process, and use social information to make sense of themselves and others. Aspects of social cognition include emotion perception, social cue interpretation, attribution style, and theory of mind, all of which appear disordered in schizophrenia. Such social cognitive deficits are believed to be important predictors of functional outcome in schizophrenia, therefore they may represent a crucial treatment target. Few studies have evaluated the influence of antipsychotic treatment on these deficits. The purpose of this review is to examine the relationship between antipsychotic treatment and social cognition, whether antipsychotics improve social cognitive function, and if so to explore differential medication effects. Comprehensive searches of PsycINFO and MEDLINE/PUBMED were conducted to identify relevant published manuscripts. Fifteen relevant papers published in English were found, describing original studies. On the basis of this review, we have drawn the following conclusions: first, the results do not engender optimism for the possibility that antipsychotic drugs can specifically facilitate social recovery. Second, the actions of antipsychotics on social cognition are inconclusive, due to lack of standardization across research groups, leading to inconsistencies between study designs, methods used, and medication dosages. Third, large-scale longitudinal investigations are needed to explore the unclear relationships between social cognition, symptoms, and functional outcome. Other non-pharmacological treatments focusing on training patients in the social cognitive areas may hold more promise.