Unveiling the need of interactions for social N400s and supporting the N400 inhibition hypothesis.

When participants (Pps) are presented with stimuli in the presence of another person, they may consider that person's perspective. Indeed, five recent ERP studies show that the amplitudes of their N400s are increased. The two most recent ones reveal that these social-N400 increases occur even when instructions do not require a focus on the other's perspective. These increases also happen when Pps know that this other person has the same stimulus information as they have. However, in all these works, Pps could see the other person. Here, we tested whether the interaction occurring with this sight is important or whether these social N400 increases also occur when the other person is seated a bit behind Pps, who are aware of it. All had to decide whether the word ending short stories was coherent, incoherent, or equivocal. No social N400 increase was observed: N400s elicited by those words in Pps who were with a confederate (n = 50) were similar to those of Pps who were alone (n = 51). On the other hand, equivocal endings did not elicit larger N400s than coherent ones but triggered larger late posterior positivities (LPPs), like in previous studies. The discussion focuses on the circumstances in which perspective-taking occurs and on the functional significance of the N400 and the LPP.

Health and Social Case Management for the Inclusion of People Living with a Schizophrenic Disorder: The PASSVers Experience.

The way the social protection system in France is organized frequently leads to coordination difficulties between the social and healthcare sectors. A health and social program has been implemented in a French medical-psychological center to optimize the coherence of the pathway for people living with schizophrenia. This study evaluated the way users and professionals perceive this program so as to assess the relevance of double case management. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with users (N = 21) and professionals (N = 11) of this program and then analyzed with Alceste software. The results highlight the overall satisfaction of the participants with the program, and the double case management was shown to be beneficial in supporting people living with schizophrenia in their life project. These results indicate that this program enabled the emergence of a collective empowerment, which could assist with the recovery process of schizophrenia.

Relationship between neurocognition and theory of mind as a function of symptomatic profile in schizophrenia: results from the national FACE-SZ cohort.

INTRODUCTION: Deficits in theory of mind (ToM) can vary depending on the predominant schizophrenia symptoms, and though most neurocognitive functions are involved in ToM, all may not be associated with the same symptoms. With consideration to the relationships between symptoms, neurocognition and ToM, the aim of the present study is to identify the neurocognitive functions influencing ToM capacities according to symptomatic profile. METHODS: The study is based on a sample of 124 adults with schizophrenia from a French national cohort. Patients were divided into two groups according to their scores on the five Wallwork factors of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale using hierarchical clustering before carrying out multivariable analyses. RESULTS: The "disorganised group" (n = 89) showed high scores on the disorganised factor, and had a ToM associated with reasoning, visual recognition and speed of processing. The "positive group" (n = 35) showed high scores on the positive and depressive factors, and had a ToM associated with working memory. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that neurocognitive predictors of ToM in schizophrenia are different according to the predominant clinical dimension, thus refining our knowledge of the relationship between symptoms, neurocognition and ToM, and acknowledging their status as important predictors of patients' functional status.

Schizophrenia patients are impaired in recognition task but more for intentionality than physical causality.

It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental states to others, such as intentions, needs and motivations but also to perform memory tasks. According to one hypothesis, these impairments may be due to an early visual attention deficit during the encounter of social stimuli. Another hypothesis posits a robust correlation between intention attribution and autobiographical memory that results in impaired recollection of past events making it difficult to infer others' intentions. In sum, the link between intention attribution and encoding process is yet to be explored in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the present study is to contribute to this debate by investigating whether schizophrenic patients' recollection can be boosted by an attentional cueing on relevant information and to determine the influence of two different situational contexts: attribution of intentions or physical causality scripts. By using a supraliminal attentional cue, we made relevant areas of our material more salient across two conditions: attribution of intentions (AI) and physical causality with human characters (PCCH). The results confirmed expected deficit of explicit memory in schizophrenia patients while attentional cueing on relevant areas for intentions attribution or physical causality had no effect on recollection in any group. However, it seems that the recollection performances are highly influenced by the nature of intentions attribution. Also, it is the first time that the material used for the assessment of theory of mind performances has been tested with a recognition test.

Impaired context processing during irony comprehension in schizotypy: An ERPs study.

Mentalizing deficits are a core manifestation of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. They contribute to the social handicap associated with the pathology, leading to disruption in autonomy, professional achievement, and interpersonal relationships. However, the underlying mechanisms of these deficits remain poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that context processing deficits would be responsible for mentalizing difficulties in schizotypy (personality traits considered as attenuated manifestations of schizophrenic symptoms) by using an irony comprehension task. Irony processing is a mentalizing exercise that requires the ability to take into account the semantic context to understand the literal meaning of the utterance, and to integrate the pragmatic context to infer the speaker's intention. These two steps of processing can be indexed by the N400 and P600 components, respectively, of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Forty participants were assigned to high or low schizotypy groups according to their Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) score, and ERPs were recorded while they read short stories ending with a literal, ironic, or incompatible statement. In the low-SPQ group, there was a significant N400 semantic context effect (literal targets elicited less negative N400 amplitudes compared to incompatible targets) followed by a P600 pragmatic context effect (ironic targets evoked greater positive P600 amplitudes than literal targets). In contrast, there was neither a N400 nor P600 effect in the high-SPQ group. These abnormalities were associated with high interpersonal SPQ factor scores. These results show a strong association between context processing, mentalizing abilities, and interpersonal functioning in schizophrenia spectrum.