Life engagement represents a holistic concept that encompasses outcomes reflecting life-fulfilment, well-being and participation in valued and meaningful activities, which is recently gaining attention and scientific interest. Despite its conceptual importance and its relevance, life engagement represents a largely unexplored domain in schizophrenia. The aims of the present study were to independently assess correlates and predictors of patient life engagement in a large and well-characterized sample of schizophrenia patients.

To assess the impact of different demographic, clinical, cognitive and functional parameters on life engagement in a large sample of patients with schizophrenia, data from the social cognition psychometric evaluation project were analyzed.

Overall schizophrenia and depressive symptom severity, premorbid IQ, neurocognitive performance, social cognition performance both in the emotion processing and theory of mind domains, functional capacity, social skills performance and real-world functioning in different areas all emerged as correlates of patient life engagement. Greater symptom severity and greater impairment in real-world interpersonal relationships, social skills, functional capacity and work outcomes emerged as individual predictors of greater limitations in life engagement.

Life engagement in people living with schizophrenia represents a holistic and complex construct, with several different clinical, cognitive and functional correlates. These features represent potential treatment targets to improve the clinical condition and also facilitate the process of recovery and the overall well-being of people living with schizophrenia.

Inaccurate self-assessment of performance is common among people with serious mental illness, and it is associated with poor functional outcomes independent from ability. However, the temporal interdependencies between judgments of performance, confidence in accuracy, and feedback about performance are not well understood.

We evaluated two tasks: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the Penn Emotion recognition task (ER40). These tasks were modified to include item-by-item confidence and accuracy judgments, along with feedback on accuracy. We evaluated these tasks as time series and applied network modeling to understand the temporal relationships between momentary confidence, accuracy judgments, and feedback. The sample constituted participants with schizophrenia (SZ; N = 144), bipolar disorder (BD; N = 140), and healthy controls (HC; N = 39).

Network models for both WCST and ER40 revealed denser and lagged connections between confidence and accuracy judgments in SZ and, to a lesser extent in BD, that were not evidenced in HC. However, associations between feedback regarding accuracy with subsequent accuracy judgments and confidence were weaker in SZ and BD. In each of these comparisons, the BD group was intermediate between HC and SZ. In analyses of the WCST, wherein incorporating feedback is crucial for success, higher confidence predicted worse subsequent performance in SZ but not in HC or BD.

While network models are exploratory, the results suggest some potential mechanisms by which challenges in self-assessment may impede performance, perhaps through hyperfocus on self-generated judgments at the expense of incorporation of feedback.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) are separate neurodevelopmental disorders that are both characterized by difficulties in social cognition and social functioning. Due to methodological confounds, the degree of similarity in social cognitive impairments across these two disorders is currently unknown. This study therefore conducted a comprehensive comparison of social cognitive ability in ASD and SCZ to aid efforts to develop optimized treatment programs.

In total, 101 individuals with ASD, 92 individuals with SCZ or schizoaffective disorder, and 101 typically developing (TD) controls, all with measured intelligence in the normal range and a mean age of 25.47 years, completed a large battery of psychometrically validated social cognitive assessments spanning the domains of emotion recognition, social perception, mental state attribution, and attributional style.

Both ASD and SCZ performed worse than TD controls, and very few differences were evident between the two clinical groups, with effect sizes (Cohen's d) ranging from 0.01 to 0.34. For those effects that did reach statistical significance, such as greater hostility in the SCZ group, controlling for symptom severity rendered them non-significant, suggesting that clinical distinctions may underlie these social cognitive differences. Additionally, the strength of the relationship between neurocognitive and social cognitive performance was of similar, moderate size for ASD and SCZ.

Findings largely suggest comparable levels of social cognitive impairment in ASD and SCZ, which may support the use of existing social cognitive interventions across disorders. However, future work is needed to determine whether the mechanisms underlying these shared impairments are also similar or if these common behavioral profiles may emerge via different pathways.