Large social cognitive impairments characterize homicide offenders with schizophrenia

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

“…Affective overmentalization emerged as a generalized deficit exhibited by both the schizotypy and negative affect groups; more specifically, the negative affect group performed intermediate to the positive schizotypy and healthy control groups. Our results are generally consistent with the schizophrenia literature showing that patients exhibit both cognitive and affective ToM deficits (Engelstad et al, 2019;López-Navarro, 2018;Lysaker et al, 2014;Montag et al, 2011;Okruszek et al, 2018;Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2007;Shur et al, 2008;Vaskinn et al, 2018;Ziv et al, 2011). Notably, our finding that the positive schizotypy group differed from controls when inferring intentions, but not thoughts, suggests that an even more nuanced distinction between aspects of ToM might be necessary for understanding ToM in schizotypy.…”

“…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.…”

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).…”

“…In SZ, a positive correlation is reported between BM processing (detection of facing direction of masked walkers) and the empathy index (Matsumoto et al, 2015). Poorer emotion recognition is associated with impaired self-reported social functional capacity, community outcome (such as lifetime relationship status and independent living) and, in particular, in individuals who committed homicide, with a tendency to under-mentalize (Engelstad et al, 2017(Engelstad et al, , 2018aEgeland et al, 2019).…”