There is a growing awareness that social cognition is a valuable construct for understanding the psycho-social disabilities in depressive illness. Numerous studies have linked affective disorders to impairments in social cognition and specifically the processing of discrete emotional stimuli. Only few studies have investigated the relation between the burden of depressive illness and social cognitive ability. To study these issues, we compared a group of first-episode depressed patients with a group of chronically depressed patients (duration >2 years) on a broad array of higher-order social cognitive measures including the metacognition assessment scale abbreviated. Contrary to prediction, deficits in social cognition were roughly equivalent between the two groups and there was no significant link between symptom severity and social cognitive ability. Having moderate to severe major depressive disorder (MDD) could be sufficient to predict the presence of deficits in social cognitive ability.