Interventions for social cognitive deficits

Abstract

Interventions for social cognitive deficits establishes the large impact these deficits exert on psychosocial functioning in major depressive disorder. The chapter reviews a variety of impairments of social cognition and how these may influence psychosocial functioning in the key domains of social performance, emotional/empathic performance, general cognitive functioning, and quality of life. It introduces multiple treatment modalities including antidepressant medication, psychotherapeutic approaches, and procedural interventions with potential treatment efficacy on facial affect recognition, interpretation of affective pictures, theory of mind performance, and prosody. It reviews evidence indicating that many current therapies are shown to have a normalizing effect on the accuracy of interpretation and the reduction of underlying negative interpretative bias. It concludes from evaluating the literature that certain antidepressants seem to correct facial affect recognition deficits, and several psychotherapeutic approaches appear well-suited for addressing impaired theory of mind or mood-congruent interpretive biases.