The nature of prodromal symptoms is that there will be a subgroup of
individuals who convert to psychosis and a larger group who do not. This
provides an additional opportunity to examine the nature of vulnerability
markers in schizophrenia. Therefore, we conducted a descriptive analysis to
compare the emotion perception and social skill performance of at-risk
individuals who converted to psychosis (n5 for emotion perception and
n4 for social skill) during the course of the study (median time to
conversion1 year) to those who did not convert (n14 for emotion
perception and n10 for social skill). Given the small sample sizes, these
analyses are merely heuristic in nature, and thus, conclusions regarding the
findings should be made cautiously.
On the emotion perception measures, the mean performance of these
groups was virtually indistinguishable; Figure 1), which supports the
conclusion that deficits in emotion perception do not seem to be
characteristic of individuals at-risk for psychosis. However, the pattern of
means for the three indices of social skill suggests that the performance of
the individuals who converted to psychosis was lower than the individuals
who did not; Figure 1), lending support for the role of impaired social skill
as a vulnerability marker for psychosis