Social cognition intervention in schizophrenia: Description of the training of affect recognition program – Indian version

Social cognition refers to mental operations involved in processing of social cues and includes the domains of emotion processing, Theory of Mind (ToM), social perception, social knowledge and attributional bias. Significant deficits in ToM, emotion perception and social perception have been demonstrated in schizophrenia which can have an impact on socio-occupational functioning. Intervention modules for social cognition have demonstrated moderate effect sizes for improving emotion identification and discrimination. We describe the Indian version of the Training of Affect Recognition (TAR) program and a pilot study to demonstrate the feasibility of administering this intervention program in the Indian population. We also discuss the cultural sensibilities in adopting an intervention program for the Indian setting. To the best of our knowledge this is the first intervention program for social cognition for use in persons with schizophrenia in India.