The Influence of Social Cognition on Ego Disturbances in Patients with Schizophrenia

Abstract

Background: Subjects experiencing ego disturbances can be classified as a distinct subgroup of schizophrenia patients. These symptoms imply a disturbance in the ego-world boundary, which in turn implies aberrations in the perception, processing and understanding of social information. This paper provides a comparison of a group of schizophrenia patients and a group of healthy controls on a range of social-cognitive tasks. Furthermore, it analyzes the relationship between ego disturbances and social-cognitive as well as clinical variables in the schizophrenia subsample. Methods: Two groups – 40 schizophrenia patients and 39 healthy subjects – were compared. In the source monitoring task, subjects performed simple computer mouse movements and evaluated the partially manipulated visual feedback as either self- or other-generated. In a second step, participants indicated the confidence of their decision on a 4-point rating scale. In an emotion-recognition task, subjects had to identify 6 basic emotions in the prosody of spoken sentences. In the ‘reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes’ test, subjects had to infer mental states from pictures that depicted others’ eyes. In an attribution task, subjects were presented with descriptions of social events and asked to attribute the cause of the event either to a person, an object or a situation. Additionally, all subjects were tested for cognitive functioning levels. Results: The schizophrenia patient group performed significantly worse on all social-cognitive tasks than the healthy control group. Correlation analysis showed that ego disturbances were related to deficits in person attribution and lower levels of confidence in the source monitoring task. Also, ego disturbances were related to higher PANSS positive scores and a higher number of hospitalizations. Stepwise regression analysis revealed that social-cognitive variables explained 48.0% of the variance in the ego-disturbance score and represented the best predictors for ego disturbances. One particular clinical variable, namely the number of hospitalizations, additionally explained 13.8% of the variance. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that ego disturbances are related to deficits in the social-cognitive domain, and, to a lesser extent, to clinical variables such as the number of hospitalizations.

The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test: Systematic review of psychometric properties and a validation study in Italy

“…The Eyes test has also been used to assess the impact of pharmacological treatment on social cognition, in particular to assess the benefit of oxytocin administration in both typical individuals (Domes, Heinrichs, Michel, Berger, & Herpertz, 2007), and in people with autism (Guastella et al, 2010) or schizophrenia (Feifel et al, 2010). On the Eyes test, deficits are found in people with autism (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, et al, 2001), schizophrenia (Kettle et al, 2008; Köther et al, 2012; Schimansky, Rössler, & Haker, 2012), eating disorders, particularly those with anorexia nervosa (Harrison et al, 2010), and in depressed elderly people with a history of suicide attempt (Szanto et al, 2012). Patients with Parkinson’s disease (Tsuruya, Kobayakawa, & Kawamura, 2011) and Huntington’s disease (Allain et al, 2011) also show impairment on the Eyes test.…”

A Gricean approach to the use of consensus and distinctiveness in causal attributions of verbally described interpersonal events

“…The covariation model is sometimes used as a normative model of human attribution (cf. Försterling & Binser, ; Schimansky et al, ; Schuster, Ruble, & Weinert, ; White, ). To the extent that normative logic dictates rational judgment, the phenomena we observed may be viewed as deviations of rationality.…”

“…There is even a recently increased interest in the model, both in applied psychological disciplines (e.g. Harris & Fiske, ; Klein, Apple, & Kahn, ; Quayle & Naidoo, ; Samnani, Singh, & Ezzedeen, ; Schimansky, Rössler, & Haker ; Schwarz, ; Seiver, Gopnik, & Goodman, ) and in fields outside of psychology (e.g. Coombs, ; Jiang, Gretzel, & Law, ; Koonce, Seybert, & Smith, ; McClure, Allen, & Wolkey, ; Ployhart, Ehrhart, & Hayes, ; Rees, Ingledew, & Hardy, ; Ryan & Boscia, ; Schwarz, ).…”

Derationalizing Delusions

“…Religious delusions often involve a spiritual identity determining relationships with others or a closeness or relationship with spiritual figures (Rieben et al, 2013). Delusions of external control, thought insertion, broadcast, and withdrawal typically involve concerns about the social permeability of the private mental experience (Schimansky et al, 2012) and being controlled by others (Hirjak et al, 2013). Delusions as a whole also commonly include beliefs about illusory social agents that seem present across themes (Bell et al, 2017).…”