These studies indicate that facial emotion identification and its underlying circuitry are dysfunctional in patients with schizophrenia and individuals at risk for schizophrenia. Thus, an index of emotion identification performance of the domain of social cognition could offer a continuous parameter that is measurable in healthy populations, is sensitive to normative variability related to sex differences and development, and yet differentiates patients with schizophrenia and those at risk for psychosis both in performance and in the activation of related brain circuitry. The remaining criterion for a measure to meet RDoC requirements as a potential domain that can be studied from the molecular to the clinical levels of analysis is association with genetic variability.
