Clinical Characteristics of Social Cognitive Processes in Major Depressive Disorder

Dysfunctional social cognition describes an important symptom of major depressive disorder (MDD). This dysfunction relates to various aspects of perception of emotional states in oneself and in others, but also applies to complex situations such as social communication. The majority of evidence supports a theory that patients with MDD show a negative bias towards ambiguous emotional information in all domains of social perception. It appears that social cognitive function varies in the course of MDD due to treatment and symptom severity. Therefore, social cognitive dysfunction often presents as a subtle phenomenon vulnerable to further disturbing influences by confounding variables. Analyses often do not consider important confounders such as symptom severity and type of treatment. Social cognitive research uses a broad spectrum of measurements with varying quality of standard psychometric criteria. Future investigations should use standardized measures with large normative samples to avoid distortions of results.