In summary, although there has been a significant increase in the
number of studies assessing social cognition in the CHR population,
often samples have been small, results have been mixed, and many
studies examined only one or two domains. The current study aimed
to expand upon previous research by examining, in a large cohort of individuals
at CHR for psychosis and healthy controls, whether social cognition
is impaired. It has been observed that the majority of individuals
who present as being at CHR and who do not make the transition to psychosis
continue to have deficits in social function (Addington et al.,
2011), plus there is a link between social cognition and social functioning.
It would therefore be important to have an improved understanding
of these early deficits in social cognition in the CHR population as
a whole so that potential treatments at this pre-psychotic phase could
be developed. We assessed three well-established areas of social cognition:
ToM (including sarcasm and lies detection), facial affect processing
and social relationship perception. Based on the previous literature, we
expected to observe a poorer performance in all three domains of social
cognition in the CHR group compared to the control group.