Listeners impressions of speakers with schizophrenia: Impact for social functioning.

International audienceIndividuals with schizophrenia show impairment in everyday verbal communication which may contribute to their social isolation. Social cognition including theory of mind, emotion processing and social perception (Couture et al., 2006) plays a critical role in social interaction, particularly in language communication (Champagne-Lavau et al., 2006; 2009). Impairment of social cognition may result in social dysfunction, at the social, school and professional levels (Fett et al., 2010). Several studies have showed impairments in social cognition in schizophrenia, using perception and comprehension paradigms in most cases. However, to our knowledge, no studies have looked at how speech patterns in schizophrenia contribute to linguistic and social impressions formed about individual with schizophrenia from the perspective of listeners. Thus, the aim of this research was twofold: Firstly, to determine whether speech and discourse content produced by individuals with schizophrenia contribute to the negative social impression experienced by people regarding schizophrenia; secondly to assess what criteria (prosodic and/or discourse content) are likely to generate this negative impression