People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders improve emotion recognition after a mindfulness-based social cognition training (socialMIND®).

Introduction: People with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (SSDs) suffer significant social cognitive impairments (Paker, Foley, Walker & Dark, 2013). Social cognitive trainings are emerging interventions aiming to target these impairments and improve functional outcomes (Green et al., 2015). Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT) (Taylor et al., 2016) and Training of Affect Recognition (TAR) both improve social cognition (Vaskinn et al., 2019). Social-MIND® is the first mindfulness-based social cognition training tailormade for people with psychosis (Mediavilla et al., 2019a). Objectives: To explore the changes in emotion recognition after SocialMIND® in a sample of people with SSD. Methods: SocialMIND® is delivered over 9 months, the first two including 8 weekly sessions. 46 patients were included: 25 subjects completed a feasibility trial while 21 subjects are currently enrolled in a Randomized Controlled Trial (Mediavilla et al., 2019b). Assessment included the RMET. Results: 46 participants completed weekly sessions and assessment. Participants displayed a significant improvement of 3,85 in RMET scores (p=0,012, d=0,42). Conclusions: SocialMIND® is one of the first social cognition trainings for SSD to show an improvement in emotion recognition. Similar pre-to post-intervention results have also been achieved by SCIT (Gordon et al., 2018; Voutilainen, Kouhia, Roberts & Oksanen, 2016) and TAR (Sachs et al., 2012). However, different methodological issues render comparisons impractical as results have been inconsistent (Roberts et al., 2014). Given the role of social cognition in schizophrenia (Galderisi et al., 2018), future research lines should delve deeper into the key active ingredients and action mechanisms of social cognition trainings for people with psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]