Irony and Proverb Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Do Female Patients “Dislike” Ironic Remarks?

Abstract

Difficulties in understanding irony and sarcasm are part of the social cognition deficits in patients with schizophrenia. A number of studies have reported higher error rates during comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationships of these impairments to schizotypal personality traits and other language deficits, such as the comprehension of proverbs, are unclear. We investigated irony and proverb comprehension in an all-female sample of 20 schizophrenia patients and 27 matched controls. Subjects indicated if a statement was intended to be ironic, literal, or meaningless and furthermore rated the meanness and funniness of the stimuli and certainty of their decision. Patients made significantly more errors than controls did. Globally, there were no overall differences in the ratings. However, patients rated the subgroup of stimuli with answers given incorrectly as having significantly less meanness and in case of an error indicated a significantly higher certainty than controls. Across all of the study participants, performances in irony (r = −0.51) and proverb (r = 0.56) comprehension were significantly correlated with schizotypal personality traits, suggesting a continuum of nonliteral language understanding. Because irony is so frequent in everyday conversations, this makes irony an especially promising candidate for social cognition training in schizophrenia.

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

“…Indeed, although they performed worse than HC participants, committing more errors than HC participants in answering the open questions, there was no difference across the different conditions. While such result disagrees with that of previous studies showing ToM difficulty with paradigms involving irony or sarcasm understanding (17–21), it is consistent with the study of Varga et al (53) and with the results of Rapp et al (54) finding relatively good performances (85% of correct responses) in SZ.…”

Cognition and Brain Function in Schizotypy: A Selective Review

“…These deficits should not be surprising given that thought disorder is a defining feature of schizophrenia and schizotypy. 27,97,98 Besides odd speech and thought disorder, individuals with elevated schizotypy show differences in correct production and interpretation of nonliteral language such as metaphors, 99 irony, 80,99,100 fauxpas, 101 and proverbs, 102 similar to schizophrenia and autism. While nonliteral language comprehension problems seem correlated with schizotypy across the spectrum, 80,102 the association in nonclinical schizotypy is subtle 103 or even controversial, 100,104 but still detectable on the neural level.…”

“…27,97,98 Besides odd speech and thought disorder, individuals with elevated schizotypy show differences in correct production and interpretation of nonliteral language such as metaphors, 99 irony, 80,99,100 fauxpas, 101 and proverbs, 102 similar to schizophrenia and autism. While nonliteral language comprehension problems seem correlated with schizotypy across the spectrum, 80,102 the association in nonclinical schizotypy is subtle 103 or even controversial, 100,104 but still detectable on the neural level. 105 A number of mechanisms may contribute to these deficits, 106 including semantic association differences, [107][108][109] aberrant semantic priming mechanisms, 106 and inadequate context integration.…”

Metaphor Processing in Schizophrenia Patients: A Study of Comprehension and Explanation of Metaphors

“…Although other aspects apart from the linguistic one may influence the comprehension of metaphors, there is evidence that impaired access to semantic knowledge plays an important role in SZ (McKenna et al, 1994;Paulsen et al, 1996). Some studies provide evidence of impaired proverb comprehension in SZ (Brune & Bodenstein, 2005;Rapp, Langohr, Mutschler, & Wild, 2014).…”