Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty with social functioning, including core aspects of daily life like effective communication, maintaining relationships, and social roles (e.g., at work). Identifying personal attributes that predict difficulties in social settings is of utmost importance as it points to potential treatment targets to improve social function. Research shows that the ability to recognize emotional expressions (e.g., is it an angry or a sad face?), as well as memory abilities more generally each predict social function in schizophrenia. Therefore, I propose that a combination of these abilities, namely memory for emotional facial expressions, may be a particularly robust predictor of social function. Moreover, the ability to remember others' emotional expressions in response to our behaviour in past situations is helpful information for regulating current behaviour, which further supports that this is likely to relate to social skills. Study1 of my dissertation will test whether this is the case by examining if poorer facial emotional memory independently predicts more difficulty across areas of social function in schizophrenia. A second study will provide further support for findings from study1 and will also explore if the relationship between memory for expressions and social function is the same in all persons with schizophrenia or rather, if individual characteristics differentially influence these links (e.g., is memory for faces more relevant for men vs women?). This will determine for whom targeting memory for facial expressions is most important. The findings from these studies will have important implications for improving general wellbeing and daily life in schizophrenia. Existing therapies already attempt to improve social functioning by targeting emotion perception, but our work may suggest that treatments should instead focus on memory for emotional expressions rather than only on the more basic ability to perceive emotions.