A task developed by a Yale Department of Psychiatry professor that measures social cognition in people with schizophrenia has been judged to have the strongest psychometric properties for use in clinical trials, according to a paper published in the medical journal Schizophrenia Bulletin.
Morris Bell, PhD, professor of psychiatry, developed the Bell Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT), which uses a series of 21 10-second video clips to measure the ability to correctly identify seven emotional states: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, or no emotion.
The psychometric properties of BLERT and seven other tasks were assessed as part a National Institute of Mental Health-funded study called the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE). The study featured 179 patients with schizophrenia and 104 healthy controls. The eight tasks were evaluated on test-retest reliability, utility as a repeated measure, relationship to functional outcome, practicality and tolerability, sensitivity to group differences, and internal consistency.
BLERT and one other measure, the Hinting Task, showed the strongest psychometric properties across all evaluation criteria. However, BLERT was the task most recommended because of its predictive validity regarding community function.
Both BLERT and the Hinting Task were deemed appropriate for use in clinical trials seeking to improve those aspects of social cognition in people with schizophrenia.
Getting this stamp of approval means that clinical trials of social cognitive interventions are going to be using this (task).
Morris Bell, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Yale
“This is saying that how well a person does on this (BLERT) actually predicts how they are functioning socially in the world independent of neurocognition,” Bell said.
He added, “Getting this stamp of approval means that clinical trials of social cognitive interventions are going to be using this (task). When you make a lasting contribution, a measurement, you never know where it’s going to go.”
In conjunction with this work at Yale, Bell is senior research career scientist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Service. He has developed several psychological instruments related to social cognition and social functioning over a career that has spanned four decades.
His research on work rehabilitation has revealed that cognitive impairment is a rate-limiting factor in improving work function. As a result, he has been at the forefront of developing cognitive remediation interventions.