Similar and contrasting dimensions of social cognition in schizophrenia and healthy subjects

An investigation of attributional style, theory of mind and executive functioning in acute paranoia and remission

“…In line with Mizrahi et al (2008) prospective study, we found that personalising bias for negative events does not significantly reduce following improvements in symptoms. Previous studies with less powerful crosssectional designs comparing acutely paranoid patients with remitted patients have found no significant personalising bias differences between patient groups (Randall et al, 2003;Aakre et al, 2009;Lincoln et al, 2010;Mehta et al, 2014a). Consistent with our findings, these studies did, however, find that remitted patients scored in between patients with acute symptoms and controls.…”

“…Previous studies have found an evidence of associations between external-personal attributions and ToM deficits (Kinderman et al, 1998;Randall et al, 2003;Mehta et al, 2014a) and taken together findings support Bentall et al's (2001) proposal that the ability to adequately represent other people's internal states is an important under-pinning capacity to enable situational attributions. However, our findings specifically highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of ToM tasks.…”

“…Although it is well recognised that social and neurocognition are distinct constructs, there is relatively consistent evidence of moderate associations between the two (Ventura et al, 2013;Mehta et al, 2014aMehta et al, , 2014b. Lincoln et al (2010) found a small but significant association between overall number of situational attributions and verbal memory capacity, but no correlations between situational attributions and cognitive flexibility as assessed by the Trail Making Test.…”

“…That is, attributing events to more benign situational-external factors requires the capacity to adopt another individual's perspective and appreciate the inherent variability of factors at play in social situations. There is some evidence of associations between ToM and personalising otherblaming attributions in non-clinical studies (Kinderman et al, 1998;Taylor and Kinderman, 2002), in a remitted sample of patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders (Mehta et al, 2014a) and in one small clinical sample with paranoid delusions during an acute phase of psychosis (Randall et al, 2003), but research investigating associations between attributional style and different aspects of ToM is underdeveloped.…”

“…There is an evidence from cross-sectional studies that remitted paranoid patients have better ToM abilities than acutely paranoid patients, although impairments in remitted patients are still evident in more cognitively demanding ToM tasks (Herold et al, 2002;Randall et al, 2003). There is also evidence that remitted patients score between paranoid and healthy controls on measures of external-personal attributions (Lincoln et al, 2010;Mehta et al, 2014a). However, there are relatively few studies that assess changes in social cognition in the same patients who move from an acute to a remitted episode of psychosis, using more powerful longitudinal designs (So et al, 2010;Ventura et al, 2013).…”