College of Psychiatric and Neurologic Pharmacists

It used to be called cold versus hot cognition, two terms that referred to tasks that either intentionally used stimuli devoid of social or emotional content to reduce unexpected confounds (cold) versus tasks that intentionally addressed social and emotional processing (hot). Now following impressive advances in basic behavioral neuroscience, this latter area is sometimes called social cognitive and affective neuroscience (SCAN), or simply social cognition. There is clearly an increased focus in the social cognition of schizophrenia as evidenced by published papers and conference presentations. The emergent research focus over the past decade has been driven by several factors, including the following: 1) increased support for social cognition's role in functional outcome in schizophrenia; 2) a greater understanding about the factors that lead to development of particular clinical symptoms, such as paranoia; 3) new evidence on the stability of social cognitive impairment across phases of illness; 4) increasing support for psychopharmacologic and psychosocial interventions for social cognitive impairment; and 5) a growing application of neuroimaging methods from SCAN to identify aberrant neural substrates in schizophrenia (). It is this last area involving SCAN methods that is the focus of the meta-analysis by Taylor et al. ().

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