Earlier this month at the Society for Social Work and Research’s (SSWR) 27th annual meeting in Phoenix, AZ, second-year Master of Social Work student Anju Kotwani gave an oral presentation of her research paper, “Mediating effects of social cognition on the relationship between neurocognition and functional outcome in early course schizophrenia: Implications for Cognitive Enhancement Therapy.”
Under the guidance of Jessica Wojtalik, assistant professor at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Kotwani’s secondary study includes a path analysis approach to mediation using data from an 18-month, multi-site clinical trial of a social work-developed cognitive remediation program for early course schizophrenia. In the paper, Kotwani also explores the indirect effect of social cognition—specifically social inference-making—and the relationship between neurocognition and functional outcomes.