Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT) for Adults With Psychotic Disorder: An Open Pilot Study in Finland

33 clinically stable in- and outpatients with chart diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or unspecified nonorganic psychosis, aged 18-56 years, were given 22-24 weekly or twice weekly sessions of a manualized group treatment for improvement of social cognition, Social Cognition and Interaction Training (1,2). Main outcome was defined as improvement in social cognition according to specific measures of facial emotion identification, Theory of Mind, attributional bias, social cognitive accuracy and metacognitive overconfidence.Emotion perception was measured with the Facial Emotion Identification Task (FEIT) (3); Theory of Mind was measured with the Hinting Task (4) and attributional bias with the Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire-Ambiguous Items (AIHQ-A) (5). In addition, broad-based social cognitive accuracy, attributional bias and metacognitive overconfidence was measured with the Social Cognition Screening Questionnaire. All the measures were evaluated at the baseline and immediately after the intervention. Changes in total scores for the FEIT and Hinting Task, and the three subscales of AIHQ-A and SCSQ were analysed separately using paired samples t-test in IBM SPSS Statistics version 21.