Nice or effective? Social problem solving strategies in patients with major depressive disorder

Theory of Mind in Depressive Disorders: A Review of the Literature

“…Deficits in second-order ToM were associated with higher depressive symptoms. Other studies comparing depressed to non-depressed individuals have noted an impaired understanding of mentalistic humour stories [46], sarcasm [47], and paradoxical sarcasm [48], a lower performance on both the ‘intentionality' and ‘appropriateness' scales of the Frith-Happé animations (FHA) [48], and a significant slowdown in emotional (affective) compared to visuospatial (cognitive) ToM judgements in a 3rd-person perspective [49] in the depressed. The results of Thoma et al [47], based on the Mentalistic Interpretation Task [50], demonstrate that MDD patients are generally good at understanding the intentions and mental states underlying interpersonal actions, but they show a lower interpretation quality of others' sarcastic utterances.…”

“…Other studies comparing depressed to non-depressed individuals have noted an impaired understanding of mentalistic humour stories [46], sarcasm [47], and paradoxical sarcasm [48], a lower performance on both the ‘intentionality' and ‘appropriateness' scales of the Frith-Happé animations (FHA) [48], and a significant slowdown in emotional (affective) compared to visuospatial (cognitive) ToM judgements in a 3rd-person perspective [49] in the depressed. The results of Thoma et al [47], based on the Mentalistic Interpretation Task [50], demonstrate that MDD patients are generally good at understanding the intentions and mental states underlying interpersonal actions, but they show a lower interpretation quality of others' sarcastic utterances. Ladegaard et al [48] did not find any significant differences between first-episode depressed patients and controls on the sincere and sarcastic variables from the Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) [51], suggesting that patients are able to correctly judge the intent of a speaker and synthesize information transmitted by body language and prosody when the discrepancy between statement and intention is simple.…”

“…Despite an increased interest in the research of the topic in recent years, no firm conclusions can be drawn, as the reviewed articles present some conflicting results. Acutely depressed patients were found to be impaired on tasks involving both ToM social-perceptual [32,33,34] and social-cognitive components [44,45,46,47,48]. On the other hand, a number of studies have not reported significant between-group differences between MDD patients and healthy controls [42,53,55,57,58] or found minimal differences [35].…”

Genome-wide analyses of self-reported empathy: correlations with autism, schizophrenia, and anorexia nervosa

“…Differences in various fractions empathy have been observed in several psychiatric conditions including autism 1 , bipolar disorder 3 , schizophrenia 4-6 , and major depressive disorder 3, 7,8 . Two major fractions of empathy include affective empathy (the drive to respond to another's mental state with an appropriate emotion) and cognitive empathy (the ability to recognize another's mental state).…”

Symptom severity of depressive symptoms impacts on social cognition performance in current but not remitted major depressive disorder

“…Given that executive function and information processing have been shown to been detrimentally effected in MDD patients (Fossati et al, 2002 ; Tsourtos et al, 2002 ; Baune et al, 2010 ; Snyder, 2013 ), it is a reasonable to assume that these would also have an impact social cognition also. While emotional information processing research has been gaining traction in the past decade (Suslow et al, 2004 ; Gilboa-Schechtman et al, 2005 ; Karparova et al, 2005 ), the relationship between executive function and social cognition requires further research (Uekermann et al, 2008 ; Ladegaard et al, 2014 ; Thoma et al, 2015 ).…”