Emotion perception, non-social cognition and symptoms as predictors of theory of mind in schizophrenia

Abstract

Both social and non-social cognition were significant predictors of ToM. Overmentalizing was only predicted by non-social cognition. Excited symptoms contributed to overall and affective ToM, and to no mentalizing errors.

Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact

“…Gender specificity of the link between BM processing and visual social cognition may be of value for better understanding a wide range of psychiatric, neurologic, neurodevelopmental, and psychosomatic conditions. Some aspects of BM processing are atypical in ASD (e.g., Klin et al, 2009;Nackaerts et al, 2012;Jack et al, 2017), schizophrenia (e.g., Kim et al, 2011;Hastings et al, 2013;Spencer et al, 2013;Hashimoto et al, 2014;Vaskinn et al, 2016Vaskinn et al, , 2018Engelstad et al, 2017Engelstad et al, , 2018aOkruszek et al, 2018) and schizotypal personality disorder (Hur et al, 2016), bipolar disorders , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Kröger et al, 2014), anxiety disorders and in individuals with elevated anxiety (van de Cruys et al, 2013;Heenan and Troje, 2015), obsessive compulsive disorders (Kim et al, 2008), and unipolar depression (Loi et al, 2013;Kaletsch et al, 2014). Deficits are also reported in individuals who were born preterm and suffer congenital brain lesions ), Alzheimer's (Henry et al, 2012;Insch et al, 2015) and Parkinson's diseases (Cao et al, 2015;Jaywant et al, 2016a,b;Kloeters et al, 2017), epilepsy (Bala et al, 2018), and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (Zucker et al, 2013;Lang et al, 2015;Dapelo et al, 2017).…”

Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind in Positive Schizotypy: Relationship to Schizotypal Traits and Psychosocial Functioning

“…Both overmentalization and undermentalization scores were calculated for each MASC mental state modality: thoughts, intentions, and emotions. Recommendations by Vaskinn et al (2018) were used to categorize MASC items as thoughts (Items 6,15,18,24,28,29,36,39,42),intentions (Items 2,3,5,7,11,16,17,19,21,23,27,31,32,37,41,43,44), and emotions (Items 1,4,8,9,10,12,13,14,20,22,25,26,30,33,34,38,40,45). For greater precision in ToM measurement, thought and intention items were not combined to create a composite cognitive score; this also allowed us to test our hypothesis that suspiciousness would be related to intent overmentalization, but not to other aspects of ToM.…”

“…Similarly, ToM studies in schizotypy are mixed (Barragan, Laurens, Navarro, & Obiols, 2011;Bedwell et al, 2014;Canli, Ozdemir, & Kocak, 2015;Deptula & Bedwell, 2015;Fernyhough, Jones, Whittle, Waterhouse, & Bentall, 2008;Fyfe, Williams, Mason, & Pickup, 2008;Gooding & Pflum, 2011;Henry, Bailey, & Rendell, 2008;Jahshan & Sergi, 2007;Langdon & Coltheart, 1999;McCleery et al, 2012;Modinos, Renken, Shamay-Tsoory, Ormel, & Aleman, 2010;Monestès, Villatte, Moore, Yon, & Loas, 2008;Morrison, Brown, & Cohen, 2013;Pflum, Gooding, & White, 2013;Pickup, 2006;Villatte, Monestès, McHugh, Freixa i Baqué, & Loas, 2008). These inconsistent findings might be partially attributable to the multifaceted nature of ToM, heterogeneous demands of tasks used across studies, and heterogeneous measurement of schizotypy (Bora, Yücel, & Pantelis, 2009;Pinkham et al, 2014;Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2007;Vaskinn, Andersson, Østefjells, Andreassen, & Sundet, 2018). For example, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test (Baron- Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001) requires participants to make inferences about others' emotions after viewing photos of eyes, whereas the Hinting Task (Corcoran, Mercer, & Frith, 1995) requires participants to make inferences about others' intentions following indirect speech.…”

“…Cognitive ToM refers to the ability to make inferences about others' beliefs, thoughts, and intentions, whereas affective ToM refers to the ability to make inferences about others' emotional states. Studies in schizophrenia have generally found deficits in both cognitive and affective ToM (Engelstad et al, 2019;Li et al, 2017;López-Navarro, 2018;Lysaker et al, 2014;Montag et al, 2011;Okruszek, Piejka, Szczepocka, Wysokiński, & Pluta, 2018;Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2007;Shur, Shamay-Tsoory, & Levkovitz, 2008;Vaskinn et al, 2018;Ziv, Leiser, & Levine, 2011). However, the extent and magnitude of these deficits remains unclear, with one study finding pronounced deficits in affective ToM (Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2007) and another finding the opposite pattern (Okruszek et al, 2018).…”

“…Undermentalization refers to the complete lack of mental state attribution or overly simplistic mental state attributions, whereas overmentalization refers to inaccurate, excessive mental state attribution that goes above and beyond the provided social cues. Studies in schizophrenia show that patients primarily exhibit undermentalization errors (Andreou et al, 2015;Engelstad et al, 2019;Martinez et al, 2017;Montag et al, 2011;Vaskinn et al, 2015Vaskinn et al, , 2018, although some studies have also found a relationship between overmentalization and positive symptoms (Fretland et al, 2015;Montag et al, 2011;Peyroux et al, 2019). Much less is known about ToM errors among individuals at risk for schizophrenia.…”