The evolution of social cognition throughout the course of schizophrenia is unclear not being possible to state whether it remains stable from early stages to chronicity, or it changes as the disease develops. For this purpose, 90 patients with schizophrenia and 139 healthy controls have been compared establishing 4 different groups paired by age and gender: first episode of psychosis patients (FEP), young healthy controls (YHC), chronic patients with schizophrenia (CS) and adult healthy controls (AHC). Performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) has been assessed using The Hinting Task and The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). In the Hinting Task, when comparing patients with their respective control group, differences found between CS patients and their corresponding controls (p < .001) are much bigger (almost twice) than differences between FEP patients and young controls (p = .001). In fact, young and adult healthy controls did not significantly differ in their scores, while the CS group showed significant worse performance than the FEP group. In the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (RMET), patients globally performed worse than controls (p < .001). However, the Cohort × Diagnosis interaction was not significant (p = .27). In this task, there were no differences between CS and FEP scores. In conclusion, data suggest poor performance in all phases of the disease with a probable worsening related to chronicity especially in the aspects of social cognition measured by the Hinting Task.

目前尚不清楚整个精神分裂症过程中社会认知的演变，尚不能说明其在早期到慢性期间是否保持稳定，还是随着疾病的发展而变化。为此，已比较了90位精神分裂症患者和139位健康对照者，并按年龄和性别将其分为4个不同的组：精神病患者首发（FEP），年轻健康对照者（YHC），慢性精神分裂症患者（CS）和成人健康对照（AHC）。心智理论（ToM）的表现已使用“提示任务”和“眼神解读”测试（RMET）进行了评估。在“提示任务”中，将患者与相应的对照组进行比较时，发现CS患者与相应的对照组之间存在差异（p <.001）比FEP患者和年轻对照组之间的差异大（几乎两倍）（p  = .001）。实际上，年轻和成年健康对照者的得分没有显着差异，而CS组的表现却显着低于FEP组。在“阅读眼中的思想”测试（RMET）中，总体而言，患者的表现比对照组差（p  <.001）。但是，队列×诊断交互作用并不显着（p = 0.27）。在这项任务中，CS和FEP分数之间没有差异。总之，数据表明该疾病在所有阶段的表现均较差，并可能与慢性病有关，尤其是在通过“ Hinting Task”测评的社会认知方面。