Social cue perception and intelligence in schizophrenia.

Previous research has shown that both acutely ill and remitted schizophrenic patients are more sensitive to the concrete, than the abstract, cues of a social situation. The purpose of this study is to determine whether this difference is attributable to a generalized performance deficit by determining whether difference in concrete and abstract cue recognition correlates with verbal intelligence. A second goal of this study is to determine whether differences in the cue perception of schizophrenic and normal control samples is also attributable to differences in verbal intelligence. Samples of inpatients (n = 23) and outpatients (n = 20) with DSM-III-R diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder completed the Social Cue Recognition Test, the Vocabulary Subtest of the WAIS-R, and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale. Standardized residual scores representing differences in sensitivity across abstract and concrete cue recognition were not found to correlate significantly with verbal IQ in either sample. However, overall sensitivity was significantly associated with intelligence in both samples and standardized residual scores were significantly associated with thinking disturbance in the inpatients. Differences in cue perception across schizophrenic and normal control samples remained significant after adjusting cue perception scores by scores on the Vocabulary Subtest. These findings suggest that the differential deficit in cue recognition may not be attributable to generalized performance deficit.