scholarly journals Comparison of social cognitive functioning in schizophrenia and high functioning autism: more convergence than divergence

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. M. Couture ◽  
D. L. Penn ◽  
M. Losh ◽  
R. Adolphs ◽  
R. Hurley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Functioning ◽  
Negative Symptom ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Symptom Group ◽  
Future Work

BackgroundIndividuals with schizophrenia and individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) seem to share some social, behavioral and biological features. Although marked impairments in social cognition have been documented in both groups, little empirical work has compared the social cognitive functioning of these two clinical groups.MethodForty-four individuals with schizophrenia, 36 with HFA and 41 non-clinical controls completed a battery of social cognitive measures that have been linked previously to specific brain regions.ResultsThe results indicate that the individuals with schizophrenia and HFA were both impaired on a variety of social cognitive tasks relative to the non-clinical controls, but did not differ from one another. When individuals with schizophrenia were divided into negative symptom and paranoid subgroups, exploratory analyses revealed that individuals with HFA may be more similar, in terms of the pattern of social cognition impairments, to the negative symptom group than to the paranoia group.ConclusionsOur findings provide further support for similarities in social cognition deficits between HFA and schizophrenia, which have a variety of implications for future work on gene–brain–behavior relationships.

scholarly journals Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 1406-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Contreras ◽  
Jessica Schirmer ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Jason P. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

scholarly journals Social cognition impairments in long-term opiate users in treatment

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-263
Author(s):  
Gill Terrett ◽  
Kimberly Mercuri ◽  
Elizabeth Pizarro-Campagna ◽  
Laila Hugrass ◽  
H Valerie Curran ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Functioning ◽  
Emotion Recognition ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Facial Emotion Recognition ◽  
Facial Emotion ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Facial Mimicry

Background: Long-term opiate users experience pervasive social difficulties, but there has been surprisingly limited research focused on social-cognitive functioning in this population. Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate whether three important aspects of social cognition (facial emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM) and rapid facial mimicry) differ between long-term opiate users and healthy controls. Methods: The participants were 25 long-term opiate users who were enrolled in opiate substitution programmes, and 25 healthy controls. Facial emotion recognition accuracy was indexed by responses to 60 photographs of faces depicting the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust). ToM was assessed using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task, which requires participants to infer mental states of others from partial facial cues. Rapid facial mimicry was assessed by recording activity in the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscle regions while participants passively viewed images of happy and angry facial expressions. Results: Relative to the control group, the opiate user group exhibited deficits in both facial emotion recognition and ToM. Moreover, only control participants exhibited typical rapid facial mimicry responses to happy facial expressions. Conclusions: These data indicate that long-term opiate users exhibit abnormalities in three distinct areas of social-cognitive processing, pointing to the need for additional work to establish how social-cognitive functioning relates to functional outcomes in this group. Such work may ultimately inform the development of interventions aimed at improving treatment outcomes for long-term opiate users.

scholarly journals Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training for Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle R. Kandalaft ◽  
Nyaz Didehbani ◽  
Daniel C. Krawczyk ◽  
Tandra T. Allen ◽  
Sandra B. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
High Functioning Autism ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Social Cognition Training
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