Social perception in parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and their adolescent offspring - The Danish High Risk and Resilience Study

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are associated with social cognitive impairments, but knowledge on social cognition in offspring of parents with these disorders is sparse. Moreover, investigations of the potential transgenerational transmission of social cognition in at-risk families are lacking. Therefore, we aimed to investigate social perception in parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and their adolescent offspring and population-based controls (PBC). This study is part of The Danish High Risk and Resilience Study, a prospective familial high-risk study of families with parental schizophrenia (n = 202) or bipolar disorder (n = 120) and PBC (n = 200). Social perception was assessed with The Awareness of Social Inferences Task, Part 2A, including a total score and the subscales sincere, simple sarcasm, and paradoxical sarcasm. Parents with schizophrenia showed poorer performance on the total scale (p < 0.007, d = 0.33) and the paradoxical sarcasm subscale (p < 0.003, d = 0.35) compared with PBC parents. We found no difference between parents with bipolar disorder and PBC parents or between the adolescent offspring. We found no significant interaction effect of familial high-risk status on any association (p ≤ 0.093), but the parents' and their adolescent offspring's social perception was positively and significantly associated on the total scale (p < 0.001), the sincere subscale (p = 0.005), and the simple sarcasm subscale (p = 0.010), but not the paradoxical sarcasm subscale (p = 0.052). Our findings of transgenerational transmission of social perception in families with parental schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and PBC call for further longitudinal research to determine how social cognitive deficits are transmitted from parents to their offspring.