Adults with schizophrenia showed an impaired ability to detect and understand sarcasm and lying in a video test depicting contextual clues such as facial expressions, vocal inflections, and body language, according to a published report.
People with schizophrenia consistently show deficits in theory of mind reasoning, defined as the ability to attribute mental states such as beliefs and intentions to other people. Most studies of this impairment use written short stories or cartoon vignettes to assess patients’ social perception abilities – tests that aren’t representative of real-world encounters and don’t include contextual clues, said Briana Cassetta and Vina Goghari, Ph.D., of the Clinical Neuroscience of Schizophrenia Laboratory and the department of psychology, University of Calgary (Alta.).
They assessed 30 adults with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, 28 first-degree relatives who did not have schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, and 27 healthy control subjects matched for age and sex. The authors used two parts of TASIT (The Awareness of Social Inference Test), which uses videotaped vignettes of professional actors presenting a series of sincere, lying, and sarcastic exchanges such as might be encountered in daily life. The people with schizophrenia showed an intact ability to understand sincere exchanges but consistently performed poorly at comprehending sarcasm and lying, compared with both control groups, the investigators reported (Psychiatry Res. 2014 [doi: 10.1016/psychres.2014.03.043]).
In this study, the unaffected relatives of schizophrenia patients attained scores that were comparable to those of healthy controls, providing further support for the idea that these theory of mind deficits are disease specific, Ms. Cassetta and Dr. Goghari noted.
Future research regarding theory of mind "may benefit from utilizing tasks that incorporate dynamic social cues that are available in everyday social communication, in order to obtain a more accurate assessment of [participants’] abilities," they added.
This study was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the University of Calgary, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Alberta Innovates Health Solutions. No financial conflicts of interest were reported.