Social Cognitive Frameworks for Understanding the Connection Between Social Isolation and Psychosis Risk

Increasing evidence demonstrates an association between social isolation and psychosis risk. In this perspective, we attempt to account for why that is. Drawing from work in social psychology, social neuroscience, and clinical psychological science, we present two frameworks for understanding the association between social isolation and psychosis risk: the social needs framework and the social processing framework. Social needs states that due to people’s inherent social needs, isolation produces increased social attention, perception, and thought to fill the social void, resulting in the perception of anomalous social information and social meaning. Social processing states that the lack of exposure to social stimuli during isolation diminishes social processing (i.e., social thought, social perceptions), and may lead isolated individuals to turn their attention inwards, blurring internal and external worlds in a way that creates reality monitoring disturbances and anomalous self-experiences. Conveniently, these frameworks can be empirically arbitrated. We review the literature connecting social isolation to psychosis, the frameworks, their empirical support, and the predictions they make. Ultimately, a better accounting of isolation’s pro-psychotic effects might lead to better efforts at psychosis prevention.