Impaired recognition of communicative interactions from biological motion in schizophrenia

Knowing me, knowing you: a scoping review assessing the current field of social cognition in schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

Impaired social cognition (SC) occurs frequently in schizophrenia (SCZ), yet compared to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the research on SC in SCZ is sparse and methodologically heterogeneous. To accurately assess between-group SC differences it is further necessary to establish the relationship between nonsocial cognition (NSC) and SC, particularly as this may not be identical across disorders.

PURPOSE

The present study aimed to map, index and assess the quality of research published between 2014-2021 investigating SC in SCZ, and to summarize existing limitations and recommendations for future research.

METHOD

Following the PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) fifteen (n = 15) case-control studies were identified and included across three electronic databases. Studies additionally utilizing ASD samples were included because of their clinical utility.

RESULTS

Most studies reported significant SC impairments in SCZ relative to healthy controls (HC) with varying effect sizes. Significant differences between SCZ and ASD were not found in most studies including both samples. Weak-to-moderate correlations between SC and NSC were often found, although often only within patient samples. Across studies, SC tests were inconsistently described as measurements of "social cognition", "mentalization" and, most frequently and varyingly, "theory of mind". Most studies lacked methodological transparency. Limitations related to sample sizes and test reliability were most frequently mentioned.

CONCLUSIONS

The current research on SC in SCZ is limited by conceptual and methodological uncertainties. Future research should focus on ensuring clear and valid definitions of key terms, evaluating and clarifying SC outcome measures and further untangling the relationship between SC and NSC.

Belief updating in psychosis, depression and anxiety disorders: A systematic review across computational modelling approaches

Alterations in belief updating are proposed to underpin symptoms of psychiatric illness, including psychosis, depression, and anxiety. Key parameters underlying belief updating can be captured using computational modelling techniques, aiding the identification of unique and shared deficits, and improving diagnosis and treatment. We systematically reviewed research that applied computational modelling to probabilistic tasks measuring belief updating in stable and volatile (changing) environments, across clinical and subclinical psychosis (n = 17), anxiety (n = 9), depression (n = 9) and transdiagnostic samples (n = 9). Depression disorders related to abnormal belief updating in response to the valence of rewards, evidenced in both stable and volatile environments. Whereas psychosis and anxiety disorders were associated with difficulties adapting to changing contingencies specifically, indicating an inflexibility and/or insensitivity to environmental volatility. Higher-order learning models revealed additional difficulties in the estimation of overall environmental volatility across psychosis disorders, showing increased updating to irrelevant information. These findings stress the importance of investigating belief updating in transdiagnostic samples, using homogeneous experimental and computational modelling approaches.

Face pareidolia in male schizophrenia

Faces are valuable signals for efficient social interaction. Yet, social cognition including the sensitivity to a coarse face scheme may be deviant in schizophrenia (SZ). Tuning to faces in non-face images such as shadows, grilled toasts, or ink blots is termed face pareidolia. This phenomenon is poorly investigated in SZ. Here face tuning was assessed in 44 male participants with SZ and person-by-person matched controls by using recently created Face-n-Thing images (photographs of non-face objects to a varying degree resembling a face). The advantage of these images is that single components do not automatically trigger face processing. Participants were administered a set of images with upright and inverted (180° in the image plane) orientation. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, they had to indicate whether an image resembled a face. The findings showed that: (i) With upright orientation, SZ patients exhibited deficits in face tuning: they provided much fewer face responses than controls. (ii) Inversion generally hindered face pareidolia. However, while in neurotypical males, inversion led to a drastic drop in face impression, in SZ, the impact of orientation was reduced. (iii) Finally, in accord with the signal detection theory analysis, the sensitivity index (d-prime) was lower in SZ, whereas no difference occurred in decision criterion. The outcome suggests altered face pareidolia in SZ is caused by lower face sensitivity rather than by alterations in cognitive bias. Comparison of these findings with earlier evidence confirms that tuning to social signals is lower in SZ, and warrants tailored brain imaging research.

Mentalizing abilities mediate the impact of the basic social perception on negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia

Social cognitive deficits are currently considered as one of the main predictors of clinical symptoms and functional outcome in patients with schizophrenia. Multiple studies have suggested that a two-factor solution (low-level vs. high-level) best describes the structure of social cognitive processes in patients. While higher-order processes have been repeatedly linked to negative symptoms, no such association was found for lower-level processes. Thus, the aim of the current study is to examine whether the association between basic social perception processes and symptoms in patients with schizophrenia is mediated by mentalizing abilities. One hundred thirty-nine patients have completed basic social perception (Communicative Interactions Database task CID-12) and mentalizing (Reading the Mind in the Eyes task) tasks. In line with our hypothesis, we have observed full mediation of the effects of basic social perception abilities on negative symptoms via mentalizing abilities in patients. This effect suggests that, similarly as in the case of positive symptoms, a hierarchical nature of social cognitive processes should be considered while investigating negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Aberrant computational mechanisms of social learning and decision-making in schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder

Psychiatric disorders are ubiquitously characterized by debilitating social impairments. These difficulties are thought to emerge from aberrant social inference. In order to elucidate the underlying computational mechanisms, patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (N = 29), schizophrenia (N = 31), and borderline personality disorder (N = 31) as well as healthy controls (N = 34) performed a probabilistic reward learning task in which participants could learn from social and non-social information. Patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder performed more poorly on the task than healthy controls and patients with major depressive disorder. Broken down by domain, borderline personality disorder patients performed better in the social compared to the non-social domain. In contrast, controls and major depressive disorder patients showed the opposite pattern and schizophrenia patients showed no difference between domains. In effect, borderline personality disorder patients gave up a possible overall performance advantage by concentrating their learning in the social at the expense of the non-social domain. We used computational modeling to assess learning and decision-making parameters estimated for each participant from their behavior. This enabled additional insights into the underlying learning and decision-making mechanisms. Patients with borderline personality disorder showed slower learning from social and non-social information and an exaggerated sensitivity to changes in environmental volatility, both in the non-social and the social domain, but more so in the latter. Regarding decision-making the modeling revealed that compared to controls and major depression patients, patients with borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia showed a stronger reliance on social relative to non-social information when making choices. Depressed patients did not differ significantly from controls in this respect. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion of a general interpersonal hypersensitivity in borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia based on a shared computational mechanism characterized by an over-reliance on beliefs about others in making decisions and by an exaggerated need to make sense of others during learning specifically in borderline personality disorder.

People suffering from psychiatric disorders frequently experience difficulties in social interaction, such as an impaired ability to use social signals to build representations of others and use these to guide behavior. Compuational models of learning and decision-making enable the characterization of individual patterns in learning and decision-making mechanisms that may be disorder-specific or disorder-general. We employed this approach to investigate the behavior of healthy participants and patients diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder while they performed a probabilistic reward learning task which included a social component. Patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder performed more poorly on the task than controls and depressed patients. In addition, patients with borderline personality disorder concentrated their learning efforts more on the social compared to the non-social information. Computational modeling additionally revealed that borderline personality disorder patients showed a reduced flexibility in the weighting of newly obtained social and non-social information when learning about their predictive value. Instead, we found exaggerated learning of the volatility of social and non-social information. Additionally, we found a pattern shared between patients with borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia who both showed an over-reliance on predictions about social information during decision-making. Our modeling therefore provides a computational account of the exaggerated need to make sense of and rely on one’s interpretation of others’ behavior, which is prominent in both disorders.

Social Perception and Interaction Database-A Novel Tool to Study Social Cognitive Processes With Point-Light Displays

Introduction: The ability to detect and interpret social interactions (SI) is one of the crucial skills enabling people to operate in the social world. Multiple lines of evidence converge to indicate the preferential processing of SI when compared to the individual actions of multiple agents, even if the actions were visually degraded to minimalistic point-light displays (PLDs). Here, we present a novel PLD dataset (Social Perception and Interaction Database; SoPID) that may be used for studying multiple levels of social information processing. Methods: During a motion-capture session, two pairs of actors were asked to perform a wide range of 3-second actions, including: (1) neutral, gesture-based communicative interactions (COM); (2) emotional exchanges (Happy/Angry); (3) synchronous interactive physical activity of actors (SYNC); and (4) independent actions of agents, either object-related (ORA) or non-object related (NORA). An interface that allows single/dyadic PLD stimuli to be presented from either the second person (action aimed toward the viewer) or third person (observation of actions presented toward other agents) perspective was implemented on the basis on the recorded actions. Two validation studies (each with 20 healthy individuals) were then performed to establish the recognizability of the SoPID vignettes. Results: The first study showed a ceiling level accuracy for discrimination of communicative vs. individual actions (93% ± 5%) and high accuracy for interpreting specific types of actions (85 ± 4%) from the SoPID. In the second study, a robust effect of scrambling on the recognizability of SoPID stimuli was observed in an independent sample of healthy individuals. Discussion: These results suggest that the SoPID may be effectively used to examine processes associated with communicative interactions and intentions processing. The database can be accessed via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/dcht8/).

Examining motion speed processing in schizophrenia using the flash lag illusion

Research on visual perception in schizophrenia suggests a deficit in motion processing. Specifically, difficulties with discriminating motion speed are commonly reported. However, speed discrimination tasks typically require participants to make judgments about the difference between two stimuli in a two-interval forced choice (2IFC) task. Such tasks not only tap into speed processing mechanisms, but also rely on higher executive functioning including working memory and attention which has been shown to be compromised in schizophrenia. We used the Flash Lag illusion to examine speed processing in patients with schizophrenia. Based on previous research showing a strong dependence between motion speed and the illusion magnitude, we expected a deficit in speed processing to alter this relationship. A motion processing deficit in patients would also predict overall reductions in perceived lag. We found the magnitude and speed dependence of the Flash Lag illusion to be similar in patients and controls. Together, the findings suggest no general abnormality in motion speed processing in schizophrenia.

Kinematics of perceived dyadic coordination in dance

We investigated the relationships between perceptions of similarity and interaction in spontaneously dancing dyads, and movement features extracted using novel computational methods. We hypothesized that dancers’ movements would be perceived as more similar when they exhibited spatially and temporally comparable movement patterns, and as more interactive when they spatially oriented more towards each other. Pairs of dancers were asked to move freely to two musical excerpts while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. Subsequently, in two separate perceptual experiments we presented stick figure animations of the dyads to observers, who rated degree of interaction and similarity between dancers. Mean perceptual ratings were compared with three different approaches for quantifying coordination: torso orientation, temporal coupling, and spatial coupling. Correlations and partial correlations across dyads were computed between each estimate and the perceptual measures. A systematic exploration showed that torso orientation (dancers facing more towards each other) is a strong predictor of perceived interaction even after controlling for other features, whereas temporal and spatial coupling (dancers moving similarly in space and in time) are better predictors for perceived similarity. Further, our results suggest that similarity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for interaction.

Naturalistic Emotion Decoding From Facial Action Sets

Researchers have theoretically proposed that humans decode other individuals' emotions or elementary cognitive appraisals from particular sets of facial action units (AUs). However, only a few empirical studies have systematically tested the relationships between the decoding of emotions/appraisals and sets of AUs, and the results are mixed. Furthermore, the previous studies relied on facial expressions of actors and no study used spontaneous and dynamic facial expressions in naturalistic settings. We investigated this issue using video recordings of facial expressions filmed unobtrusively in a real-life emotional situation, specifically loss of luggage at an airport. The AUs observed in the videos were annotated using the Facial Action Coding System. Male participants (n = 98) were asked to decode emotions (e.g., anger) and appraisals (e.g., suddenness) from facial expressions. We explored the relationships between the emotion/appraisal decoding and AUs using stepwise multiple regression analyses. The results revealed that all the rated emotions and appraisals were associated with sets of AUs. The profiles of regression equations showed AUs both consistent and inconsistent with those in theoretical proposals. The results suggest that (1) the decoding of emotions and appraisals in facial expressions is implemented by the perception of set of AUs, and (2) the profiles of such AU sets could be different from previous theories.

Aberrant patterns of neural activity when perceiving emotion from biological motion in schizophrenia

Social perceptual deficits in schizophrenia are well established. Recent work suggests that the ability to extract social information from bodily cues is reduced in patients. However, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this deficit. In the current study, 20 schizophrenia patients and 16 controls completed two tasks using point-light animations during fMRI: a basic biological motion task and an emotion in biological motion task. The basic biological motion task was used to localize activity in posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), a critical region for biological motion perception. During the emotion in biological motion task, participants viewed brief videos depicting happiness, fear, anger, or neutral emotions and were asked to decide which emotion was portrayed. Activity in pSTS and amygdala was interrogated during this task. Results indicated that patients showed overall reduced activation compared to controls in pSTS and at a trend level in amygdala across emotions, despite similar task performance. Further, a functional connectivity analysis revealed that controls, but not patients, showed significant positive connectivity between pSTS and left frontal regions as well as bilateral angular gyrus during the emotion in biological motion task. These findings indicate that schizophrenia patients show aberrant neural activity and functional connectivity when extracting complex social information from simple motion stimuli, which may contribute to social perception deficits in this disorder.

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Perception of social information from bodily cues is impaired in schizophrenia.

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We examined neural correlates of perception of emotion from biological motion.

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Activity in amygdala and posterior superior temporal sulcus was reduced in patients.

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pSTS functional connectivity with frontal and parietal regions was reduced in patients.

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Aberrant neural responses may contribute to social perceptual deficits in schizophrenia.

Brain correlates of recognition of communicative interactions from biological motion in schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

Recognition of communicative interactions is a complex social cognitive ability which is associated with a specific neural activity in healthy individuals. However, neural correlates of communicative interaction processing from whole-body motion have not been known in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ). Therefore, the current study aims to examine the neural activity associated with recognition of communicative interactions in SCZ by using displays of the dyadic interactions downgraded to minimalistic point-light presentations.

METHODS

Twenty-six healthy controls (HC) and 25 SCZ were asked to judge whether two agents presented only by point-light displays were communicating or acting independently. Task-related activity and functional connectivity of brain structures were examined with General Linear Model and Generalized Psychophysiological Interaction approach, respectively.

RESULTS

HC were significantly more efficient in recognizing each type of action than SCZ. At the neural level, the activity of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) was observed to be higher in HC compared with SCZ for communicative v. individual action processing. Importantly, increased connectivity of the right pSTS with structures associated with mentalizing (left pSTS) and mirroring networks (left frontal areas) was observed in HC, but not in SCZ, during the presentation of social interactions.

CONCLUSION

Under-recruitment of the right pSTS, a structure known to have a pivotal role in social processing, may also be of importance for higher-order social cognitive deficits in SCZ. Furthermore, decreased task-related connectivity of the right pSTS may result in reduced use of additional sources of information (for instance motor resonance signals) during social cognitive processing in schizophrenia.

It Is Not Just in Faces! Processing of Emotion and Intention from Biological Motion in Psychiatric Disorders

Social neuroscience offers a wide range of techniques that may be applied to study the social cognitive deficits that may underlie reduced social functioning—a common feature across many psychiatric disorders. At the same time, a significant proportion of research in this area has been conducted using paradigms that utilize static displays of faces or eyes. The use of point-light displays (PLDs) offers a viable alternative for studying recognition of emotion or intention inference while minimizing the amount of information presented to participants. This mini-review aims to summarize studies that have used PLD to study emotion and intention processing in schizophrenia (SCZ), affective disorders, anxiety and personality disorders, eating disorders and neurodegenerative disorders. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the reviewed studies: first, the social cognitive problems found in most of the psychiatric samples using PLD were of smaller magnitude than those found in studies presenting social information using faces or voices. Second, even though the information presented in PLDs is extremely limited, presentation of these types of stimuli is sufficient to elicit the disorder-specific, social cognitive biases (e.g., mood-congruent bias in depression, increased threat perception in anxious individuals, aberrant body size perception in eating disorders) documented using other methodologies. Taken together, these findings suggest that point-light stimuli may be a useful method of studying social information processing in psychiatry. At the same time, some limitations of using this methodology are also outlined.

Biological motion processing in schizophrenia - Systematic review and meta-analysis

CONTEXT

Patients with schizophrenia show impairments in processing of biological motion. This is especially important since deficits in domains of social cognition has been associated with functional outcome and everyday functioning in this population.

OBJECTIVES

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies which have used point-light displays to present whole-body motion to patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, to evaluate the magnitude of differences between these groups in biological motion processing.

METHOD

Firstly, relevant publications were identified by a systematic search of Google Scholar and PubMed databases. Secondly, we excluded non-relevant studies for the meta-analysis according to our exclusion criteria. Effect sizes were expressed as standardized mean difference (SMD).

RESULTS

15 papers reporting results of 14 different experiments with 571 patients and 482 controls were included in the meta-analysis. The results for the general biological motion perception analysis revealed that patients with schizophrenia (compared with healthy controls) present reduced biological motion processing capacity with the effect size (SMD) of 0.66 (95% CI, -0.79 to -0.54; p<0.001). The results for the specific biological motion-based tasks were also statistically significant with SMD of 0.72 for Basic Biological Motion task (95% CI: -0.94 to -0.51; p<0.001) and SMD of 0.61 for Emotion in Biological Motion task, (95% CI: -0.79 to -0.43; p<0.001) respectively.

CONCLUSION

The findings from our meta-analysis highlight abnormalities in general and specific domains of biological motion perception in schizophrenia patients as compared with healthy controls.

Impairment in emotion perception from body movements in individuals with bipolar I and bipolar II disorder is associated with functional capacity

Background

Individuals with bipolar disorder present with moderate impairments in social cognition during the euthymic state. The impairment extends to theory of mind and to the perception of emotion in faces and voices, but it is unclear if emotion perception from body movements is affected. The main aim of this study was to examine if participants with bipolar disorder perform worse than healthy control participants on a task using point-light displays of human full figures moving in a manner indicative of a basic emotion (angry, happy, sad, fearful, neutral/no emotion). A secondary research question was whether diagnostic subtypes (bipolar I, bipolar II) and history of psychosis impacted on this type of emotion perception. Finally, symptomatic, neurocognitive, and functional correlates of emotion perception from body movements were investigated.

Methods

Fifty-three individuals with bipolar I (n = 29) or bipolar II (n = 24) disorder, and 84 healthy control participants were assessed for emotion perception from body movements. The bipolar group also underwent clinical, cognitive, and functional assessment. Research questions were analyzed using analyses of variance and bivariate correlations.

Results

The bipolar disorder group differed significantly from healthy control participants for emotion perception from body movements (Cohen’s d = 0.40). Analyses of variance yielded no effects of sex, diagnostic subtype (bipolar I, bipolar II), or history of psychosis. There was an effect of emotion, indicating that some emotions are easier to recognize. The lack of a significant group × emotion interaction effect points, however, to this being so regardless of the presence of bipolar disorder. Performance was unrelated to manic and depressive symptom load but showed significant associations with neurocognition and functional capacity.

Conclusions

Individuals with bipolar disorder had a small but significant impairment in the ability to perceive emotions from body movement. The impairment was global, i.e., affecting all emotions and equally present for males and females. The impairment was associated with neurocognition and functional capacity, but not symptom load. Our findings identify pathopsychological factors underlying the functional impairment in bipolar disorder and suggest the consideration of social cognition training as part of the treatment for bipolar disorder.

Rethinking Social Cognition in Light of Psychosis: Reciprocal Implications for Cognition and Psychopathology

The positive symptoms of psychosis largely involve the experience of illusory social actors and yet our current measures of social cognition, at best, only weakly predict their presence. We review evidence to suggest that the range of current approaches in social cognition is not sufficient to explain the fundamentally social nature of these experiences. We argue that social agent representation is an important organising principle for understanding social cognition and that alterations in social agent representation may be a factor in the formation of delusions and hallucination in psychosis. We evaluate the feasibility of this approach in light of clinical and non-clinical studies, developmental research, cognitive anthropology and comparative psychology. We conclude with recommendations for empirical testing of specific hypotheses and how studies of social cognition could more fully capture the extent of social reasoning and experience in both psychosis and more prosaic mental states.

Facilitating Effects of Emotion on the Perception of Biological Motion: Evidence for a Happiness Superiority Effect

It has been reported that visual perception can be influenced not only by the physical features of a stimulus but also by the emotional valence of the stimulus, even without explicit emotion recognition. Some previous studies reported an anger superiority effect while others found a happiness superiority effect during visual perception. It thus remains unclear as to which emotion is more influential. In the present study, we conducted two experiments using biological motion (BM) stimuli to examine whether emotional valence of the stimuli would affect BM perception; and if so, whether a specific type of emotion is associated with a superiority effect. Point-light walkers with three emotion types (anger, happiness, and neutral) were used, and the threshold to detect BM within noise was measured in Experiment 1. Participants showed higher performance in detecting happy walkers compared with the angry and neutral walkers. Follow-up motion velocity analysis revealed that physical difference among the stimuli was not the main factor causing the effect. The results of the emotion recognition task in Experiment 2 also showed a happiness superiority effect, as in Experiment 1. These results show that emotional valence (happiness) of the stimuli can facilitate the processing of BM.

Communicative interactions in point-light displays: Choosing among multiple response alternatives

Vision scientists are increasingly relying on the point-light technique as a way to investigate the perception of human motion. Unfortunately, the lack of standardized stimulus sets has so far limited the use of this technique for studying social interaction. Here, we describe a new tool to study the interaction between two agents starting from point-light displays: the Communicative Interaction Database - 5AFC format (CID-5). The CID-5 consists of 14 communicative and seven non-communicative individual actions performed by two agents. Stimuli were constructed by combining motion capture techniques and 3-D animation software to provide precise control over the computer-generated actions. For each action stimulus, we provide coordinate files and movie files depicting the action as seen from four different perspectives. Furthermore, the archive contains a text file with a list of five alternative action descriptions to construct forced-choice paradigms. In order to validate the CID-5 format, we provide normative data collected to assess action identification within a 5AFC tasks. The CID-5 archive is freely downloadable from http://bsb-lab.org/research/ and from the supplementary materials of this article.

Reading Emotions from Body Movement: A Generalized Impairment in Schizophrenia

Body language reading is a social cognitive process with importance for successful maneuvering of social situations. In this study, we investigated body language reading as assessed with human point-light displays in participants with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (n = 84) compared to healthy control participants (n = 84), aiming to answer three questions: (1) whether persons with a diagnosis of schizophrenia have poorer body language reading abilities than healthy persons; (2) whether some emotions are easier to read from body language than others, and if this is the same for individuals with schizophrenia and healthy individuals, and (3) whether there are sex differences in body language reading in participants with schizophrenia and healthy participants. A fourth research aim concerned associations of body language reading with symptoms and functioning in participants with schizophrenia. Scores on the body language reading measure was first standardized using a separate sample of healthy control participants (n = 101). Further results showed that persons with schizophrenia had impaired body language reading ability compared to healthy persons. A significant effect of emotion indicated that some emotions (happiness, neutral) were easier to recognize and this was so for both individuals with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. There were no sex differences for either diagnostic group. Body language reading ability was not associated with symptoms or functioning. In conclusion; schizophrenia was characterized by a global impairment in body language reading that was present for all emotions and across sex.

The Multilingual CID-5: A New Tool to Study the Perception of Communicative Interactions in Different Languages

The investigation of the ability to perceive, recognize, and judge upon social intentions, such as communicative intentions, on the basis of body motion is a growing research area. Cross-cultural differences in ability to perceive and interpret biological motion, however, have been poorly investigated so far. Progress in this domain strongly depends on the availability of suitable stimulus material. In the present method paper, we describe the multilingual CID-5, an extension of the CID-5 database, allowing for the investigation of how non-conventional communicative gestures are classified and identified by speakers of different languages. The CID-5 database contains 14 communicative interactions and 7 non-communicative actions performed by couples of agents and presented as point-light displays. For each action, the database provides movie files with the point-light animation, text files with the 3-D spatial coordinates of the point-lights, and five different response alternatives. In the multilingual CID-5 the alternatives were translated into seven languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Polish). Preliminary data collected to assess the recognizability of the actions in the different languages suggest that, for most of the action stimuli, information presented in point-light displays is sufficient for the distinctive classification of the action as communicative vs. individual, as well as for identification of the specific communicative gesture performed by the actor in all the available languages.

Factors contributing to social cognition impairment in borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia

Social cognition (SC) deficits have been described both in patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, while the former tend towards simplistic mental state attributions (undermentalizing), the latter are more likely to make overly complex mental state inferences (overmentalizing). Performance on complex SC tasks has been shown to correlate with neurocognitive ability, emotion perception, a history of trauma, and overconfidence in errors. However, it is unclear how these factors relate to different aspects of SC deficits. Aim of the present study was to examine the pathways of SC impairment by investigating performance profiles and their predictors comparatively in BPD and schizophrenia. Participants were 44 patients with BPD, 36 patients with schizophrenia, and 38 healthy controls. Undermentalizing and overmentalizing were assessed with an ecologically valid SC task. Patients with BPD exhibited increased overmentalizing, whereas patients with schizophrenia showed a more extensive deficit pattern, their main error type being undermentalizing. Overconfidence in errors was the most important predictor for overmentalizing, while undermentalizing depended mainly on verbal memory and emotion perception. Thus, BPD und schizophrenia exhibited different SC impairment patterns, and different types of SC errors were predicted by different factors. These findings have implications for the optimization of treatment approaches.