Evaluating a Novel Mobile App for Social Cognition in Psychosis

Each session lasts 90 minutes and includes three 20-minute work packages tapping different social cognition skills; specifically affect recognition and theory of mind/mental state attribution in this study. Examples of the work packages include guessing the emotions of others based on their facial expressions, activities such as indicating how confident participants feel about guessing emotions when looking at more ambiguous pictures, and watching/discussing video clips with content relevant to the group.

"The novel homework app was designed to deliver tasks to the participants between group therapy sessions. Three types of task were delivered by the app; 'Stories', 'Emotions', and 'Facts and Guesses'. The 'Stories' task was designed to encourage participants to think about how thoughts, emotions and actions interact. Participants were presented with a short vignette and asked to identify the emotion or behaviour of a character. 'Emotions' aimed to target affect perception by presenting faces of different emotion presentations and asking clients to select the correct emotion from a list of three, whilst 'Facts and Guesses' aimed to address difficulties with jumping to conclusions in social situations by showing clients a photograph of a social situation and asking them to determine whether a given statement about the photo was a fact or a guess. Confidence in answers was also assessed in order to encourage flexible thinking."