For a measure of social cognition to represent an RDoC domain it needs to be reliably tractable across several levels of analysis and extendable to basic and, ultimately, molecular genetic levels of analysis. Validating such a measure would require demonstration of adequate psychometric properties such as internal consistency and construct validity, and evidence for external validity such as association with known sources of individual differences like age and sex. Additional requirements for such a measure are, in the context of the RDoC vision, that it has been reliably coupled to activation in brain systems implicated in social cognition, that it is sensitive to the presence of psychiatric symptomatology and, finally, that it is heritable and thus likely to be linkable to genetic influences and mechanisms. Here we will illustrate such a measure, facial emotion identification.
