A recent study highlights the importance of assessing multiple groups of schizotypes, as well as the value of including several social cognition tasks, in order to reveal relative performance deficits. Researchers compared accuracy and reaction time in 3 groups of individuals characterized by positive schizotypy (n=79), negative schizotypy (n=123), or low schizotypy group (n=137). They found:

• On a social cognition task that provided context, namely, the Emotion Perspective Taking Task, the positive schizotypes showed poorer performance than the negative schizotypy and control groups.
• This suggests that some schizotypes differ in their ability to make use of context (eg, social cues from the environment) to affect their social cognitive performance.
• However, on the Affective Responsiveness Task, in which no context was given, both groups of psychometric schizotypes displayed lower performance than the controls.