PW01-195 - The Evaluation Of Mentalisation Deficit With False-Irony Test In Schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction

A group of schizophrenic patients perform well in known theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Still most of them have difficulties to understand social situations in real life.

Aims

We used a new test of ToM to find out if this group of patients really have the ability to understand other people´s mental states or they might use some compensatory strategies.

Methods

49 schizophrenic patients and 38 matched control inviduals were evaluated. Participants were asked to read short stories and answer simple yes/no comprehension questions. We used three experimental conditions: “false-irony” condition (FI), “control” condition (C), and “false-irony with linguistic help” condition (FIH).

Results

P atients with schizophrenia performed sinificantly worse than control subjects in each of the three conditions (FI:p=0.01;C:p=0.04;FIH:p=0.01). Among the 49 patients 22 did well the FIH tasks (44.89%). Among these 22 patients 12 did the FI tasks well (24.48%) and the other 10 did the FIH tasks well (20.4%).

Conclusions

P atients with schizophrenia performed a sinificant impairment in the new ToM test. Beside a group of patients is able to understand other people´s mental states. To understand these situations some patients probably use real mentalisation strategies, some of them can use the given linguistic help as a compensatory strategy, and some patients have difficulties in representing of the mental states of others.