Theory of Mind and Context Processing in Schizophrenia: The Role of Social Knowledge

Abstract

The present study sought to determine whether social knowledge such as speaker occupation stereotypes may impact theory of mind (ToM) ability in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). Thirty individuals with SZ and 30 matched healthy control (HC) participants were tested individually on their ToM ability using a paradigm showing that stereotypes such as speaker occupation influences the extent to which speaker ironic intent is understood. ToM ability was assessed with open questions on the speaker ironic intent, irony rating, and mockery rating. Social perception was also assessed through politeness rating. The main results showed that SZ participants, like HC participants, were sensitive to the social stereotypes. They used these stereotypes adequately to attribute mental states such as speaker ironic intent to a protagonist while they found it difficult to explicitly judge and attribute negative attitude and emotion, as evidenced by mockery rating. No difference was found between the two groups regarding social perception ability. These performances were not associated with clinical symptoms. The integration of contextual information seems to be a good target for cognitive remediation aiming to increase social cognition ability.

Stereotype Knowledge and Endorsement in Schizophrenia

“…In sum, patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls displayed very similar perceptions about the relative typicality of the presented traits. The present findings are strongly in line with those reported by Champagne-Lavau and Charest [15] , who found that patients with schizophrenia and healthy control respondents were equally sensitive to social stereotypes in the domain of professional occupations. Overall, this is consistent with the idea that individuals with schizophrenia have a relatively intact knowledge about socially shared stereotypes.…”

“…For instance, according to prevalent models of social perception [11,23] the early activation of stereotypes represents the basic process that sets the background for all the subsequent stages of impression formation and social interaction. The present and previous findings [15] suggest that individuals with schizophrenia hold the same stereotypical knowledge and expectations as healthy individuals, and likely rely on them in their daily life marked by multiple interactions with other people belonging to a variety of different social groups. A notable limitation of the present studies is that participants were asked to provide rather abstract judgments about the estimated prevalence of stereotypical and counterstereotypical traits in the tar-get groups.…”

“…On the other hand, because stereotypical representations are acquired very early in life [14] and are very resistant to change [10] , they might be relatively unaltered in patients with schizophrenia. One relevant study provides preliminary evidence that stereotypes impact social judgments of patients with schizophrenia to a similar extent as compared to healthy control respondents [15] . In particular, the authors found that social knowledge, such as the speaker occupation stereotype, was also used by patients with schizophrenia in order to understand the likely ironic intent of the speaker.…”

Figurative Language Comprehension in Schizophrenia and Its Neural Basis

“…In daily communication, there is a gap between utterance meaning and sentence meaning, and pragmatics helps to construct utterance meaning (Giora, 1995(Giora, , 1997Grice, 1975Grice, , 1991. Many pragmatists and psycholinguists believe that theory of mind (ToM) can help listener to fill in the gap between the two meanings, and it is believed that pragmatic ability is in close relationship to ToM (Champagne-Lavau & Charest, 2015;Champagne-Lavau, Charest, Anselmo, Rodriguez, & Blouin, 2012;Spotorno, Koun, Prado, Van Der Henst, & Noveck, 2012).…”

Interaction Between Val158Met Catechol‐O‐Methyltransferase Polymorphism and Social Cognitive Functioning in Schizophrenia: Pilot Study

“…This allows a wide variety of mental states different from one's own to be understood (Couture et al., ). Patients with schizophrenia are sensitive to social stereotypes (Champagne‐Lavau et al., ), but their ability to mentalize and attribute beliefs remain markedly impaired (Bozikas et al., ).…”