Comparative study of emotion recognition and theory of mind between major depressive disorder and schizophrenia

Background: Social cognition as a transdiagnostic construct between major depressive disorder (MDD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) is not well understood. This may be attributed to the variability of social cognitive measures indexing the same construct. This study aims to compare emotion recognition and theory of mind domains, known to be impaired in SCZ, between MDD and SCZ. Methods: Three groups of participants (NTotal = 150) were enrolled in this study: MDD (n = 51), SCZ (n = 50) and healthy controls (HC; n = 49). Emotion recognition was assessed on the Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT) and Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER40); theory of mind was measured on The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). Mixed ANCOVAs were utilised to compare social cognitive performance across the groups. Results: SCZ performed poorer in all 3 social cognition tasks compared to both MDD and HC. No statistically significant difference in social cognitive performance was observed between MDD and HC. Conclusions: This study serves as an effort towards employing the same standardised social cognitive measures for direct comparison of performance patterns across diagnostic groups. Future work is needed to extend this in larger samples of different illness severity and diagnostic categories.