Metacognition and social function in schizophrenia: Associations of mastery with functional skills competence

Empathy in depression: Egocentric and altercentric biases and the role of alexithymia

“…Impaired understanding of other minds has been explored in different ways by establishing different frameworks: Theory of Mind (ToM) represents, the ability to understand the mental states of others, such as beliefs and intentions (Premack and Woodruff, 1978), metacognition represents the ability to think about thinking (Flavell, 1979) and empathy represents the ability to share feelings of others (De Vignemont and Singer, 2006). There has been growing theory and evidence for the connection between poor understanding of others in many mental disorders such as for example schizophrenia, personality disorders, and also depression (Dimaggio et al, 2012;Lysaker et al, 2013;Lysaker et al, 2011;Schreiter et al, 2013). Whether there exist deficits in empathy in depression remains largely unknown.…”

Impact of interpersonal factors on insight in schizophrenia

“…Insight level has been positively associated with social cognition independently from neurocognition (Bora et al, 2007;Langdon and Ward, 2009;Konstantakopoulos et al, 2014;Quee et al, 2014). These personal abilities, which involve synthetic metacognitive operations (see Kukla et al, 2013;Lysaker et al, 2013), are a condition for high functioning in a complex interpersonal world (Lysaker et al, 2011) or to highly self-perceived recovery in the domain describing reliance on others (Kukla et al, 2013). With respect to characteristics of the close environment, one study showed that awareness of illness was weakly associated with several dimensions of the social network: positively with the number of close friends, primary group size, frequency of contacts with friends and family, having both close friends and close family members; and negatively with satisfaction regarding contact with friends (White et al, 2000).…”

Trauma, Dissociation and Synthetic Metacognition in Schizophrenia

“…Metacognitive mastery, in other words an ability to use knowledge about oneself, other people, and context of a situation to cope with mental health problems, has close relationship with intrinstic motivation in schizophrenia and both qualities predict learning ability (Tas et al, 2012). Metacognitive mastery shows a similar connection also in relation to functional competence (Lysaker et al, 2011b;Lysaker et al, 2011d) and moderates influence of neurocognitive deficits on social functions (Lysaker et al, 2010c). A similar finding is that better self-reflection prospectively predicts keeping a job position in schizophrenic patients (Lysaker et al, 2010a).…”