Social competence as a process-reactive dimension with schizophrenics, alcoholics, and normals.

The effect of the level of social competence on the performance of a paired discrimination task involving social censure cues for groups of hospitalized schizophrenics, alcoholics, and normals was investigated. Previous studies finding differences between process and reactive schizophrenics had not controlled for the social competence level of the normal controls. Twentyfour subjects from each diagnostic category were divided equally among groups of low, middle, and high social competence levels. Low social competence subjects discriminated maternal censure stimuli more poorly than middle or high socially competent groups. Psychiatric diagnosis had no significant effect on performance. The results do not support the social censure theory of schizophrenia and suggest that there has been confounding between social competence level and diagnosis in previous process-reactive research.