摘要：Schizophrenia exerts its devastating effects mostly by causing a profound and poorly understoodinability to function, affecting different aspects of everyday life from daily activities to a lack ofsocial contacts, unemployment, and the consequences of stigmatisation. In empirical studies, socialdysfunction is defined as a social performance measure, commonly based on the principlesof cognitivism, and usually evaluated in laboratory and everyday settings. In schizophrenia, itis thought to be caused by cognitive dysfunction, related to brain dysfunction. From a medicalperspective, schizophrenia is understood as a neurodevelopmental disorder resulting in a patternof disconnection between important brain areas. Nevertheless, measures of neurocognition donot explain the expected amount of variance in social functioning. Other explanatory models ofsocial dysfunction include structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and clinical phenomenology.Phenomenological accounts relate to the classical tradition in psychopathology,which describes schizophrenia as being marked by a certain “Gestalt”, which is in turn recognisedas a distinctive and pervasive change in an individual’s self-experience and attunementto the surrounding world, thus emphasising the subjective experience of others. In the presentpaper, we intend to empirically explore the dilemma concerning the causes of social dysfunctionin schizophrenia and to show how the comprehension, gained via a neuroscientific approach toa complex brain phenomenon can be meaningfully expanded by adding insights from differentexplanatory models. These models need to be operationalised so that all the data can be incorporatedinto a comprehensive statistical analysis.
关键词：schizophrenia; social dysfunction; explanatory models; neurocognition;clinical phenomenology
