Social Cognition in Schizophrenia

摘要

This chapter discusses the main operational issues of a peculiar aspect of social cognition, "theory of mind," and its implications in schizophrenia. A brief review of current literature on theory of mind is provided, together with an outline of our department's contribution to this issue in the evaluation of a small sample of people affected by chronic schizophrenia and divided into subgroups according to psychopathological dimensions compared with normal controls. People with chronic schizophrenia and normal IQs have significantly worse performances than normal controls in both first- and second-order theory of mind stories. In first-order stories (a false belief about the state of the world), significant differences were found among psychopathological dimensions. As for second-order stories (a false belief about the belief of another character), one out of four patients subgroups performed worse than the others in one of the four theory of mind stories in our experimental model. Social cognition abilities may be a relevant aspect in social interactions involving people affected by schizophrenia and need to be further investigated in clinical research.