Exploratory study of the association between insight and Theory of Mind (ToM) in stable schizophrenia patients

“Theory of mind” is impaired in Huntington's disease

“…In any event, the present study could show that patients with HD have profound deficits in ToM that closely resemble those found in schizophrenia with partial independence of neurocognitive performance. This finding is entirely compatible with observations of selective deficits in insight in patients with HD,33 and lack of awareness of cognitive and motor symptoms,34–36 particularly because it has repetitively been shown in schizophrenia that a lack of insight into the disorder often corresponds with impairments in ToM 37–40. Exploring possible associations between symptom awareness and ToM in HD could be a fruitful approach in future studies.…”

Insight and theory of mind in schizophrenia

“…Bora and colleagues (2007) found an association between clinical insight and a narrative false belief task, but not with an adapted version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. Additional investigations further observed significant associations between clinical insight and ToM, as measured by a false belief task (Langdon et al, 2006; Pousa et al, 2008; Langdon and Ward, 2009), and the Hinting Task (Greig et al, 2004). Drake and Lewis (2003), however, did not find a significant association between clinical insight and a joke comprehension assessment of mental state attribution, and Langdon et al (2006) reported a significant association between clinical and ToM measured by the joke comprehension test and a false belief narrative task, but not a story comprehenion ToM test.…”

“…These inconsistent findings may be due to sample differences in severity of neurocognitive impairment or symptoms or the extent to which these factors are associated with different ToM tasks. ToM task performance and cognitive and clinical insight have all been found to be associated with neurocognitive impairment (Smith et al, 2000; Roncone et al, 2002; Drake and Lewis, 2003; Rossell et al, 2003; Sergi et al, 2007; Lepage et al, 2008; Bora et al, 2009; Nair et al, 2014), positive symptoms (Roncone et al, 2002; Mintz et al, 2003; Brüne, 2005; Sprong et al, 2007; Pousa et al, 2008; Konstantakopoulos et al, 2014), and negative symptoms (Frith, 1992; Roncone et al, 2002; Mintz et al, 2003; Rossell et al, 2003; Couture et al, 2011) in schizophrenia. One recent investigation (Konstantakopoulos et al, 2014) examined the association between clinical insight and ToM in individuals with schizophrenia, independent of shared variance with neurocognition and symptom severity, and found an independent association between clinical insight and ToM, indexed by a composite score from the False Belief Task, the Hinting Task, and the Faux Pas Recognition Task.…”

From Theory to Clinical Practice: A Phenomenologically Inspired Intervention for Patients with Schizophrenia

“…This interpersonal context of ‘shared attention' resembles the corresponding process in the infant's development by which 3PP abilities were originally acquired [24]. Here, we use 3PP abilities as an umbrella term for a range of interrelated abilities that are crucial for distancing oneself from cumbering experiences [25], to view and reflect on them [26], to evaluate them from the perspective of an outside observer and finally to attribute them to their probable causes, for example, to a mental illness [27,28,29,30]. We assume that it is especially this interpersonal context of therapy that may assist the patient to eventually adopt a 3PP stance towards his experiential abnormalities.…”