Neural correlates of social cognition in populations at risk of psychosis: A systematic review.

Social cognition refers to the mental operations governing social interactions. Recent research has highlighted the importance of social cognition in determining functional outcome in patients with schizophrenia and in psychosis risk populations. The aim of this review is to investigate the neural correlates of social cognition in different psychosis risk populations, potentially representing different levels of risk i.e. high schizotypy (SR), familial risk (FR) and clinical high risk (CHR). PsychINFO, Web of Science and PubMed were systematically searched, and 39 papers were included in the final review. Results in FR samples were highly inconclusive. In SR samples, findings showed a tendency towards increased task related activity in frontal cortex regions. The most consistent results come from CHR samples, where findings suggest increased task related activity in frontal and cingulate cortices. Interestingly, all studies of CHR populations also report increased activity in temporal cortex and abnormal response to neutral stimuli during emotional processing tasks. These findings are discussed in relation to dopamine models of psychosis due to temporal cortex abnormality.