Theory of mind and tendency to self-reference in schizophrenic patients

Schizophrenic patients have difficulties in inferring mental states of others and, therefore, in predicting their behaviour, which is described as impairment in theory of mind. In addition, schizophrenic patients show a tendency to self-reference, insofar as they interpret the behaviour of other persons in uncertain social situations as referring to themselves. The present study is addressed to the question, whether there is a relation between these abnormalities. Therefore 30 schizophrenic patients are compared with 25 patients with alcohol dependence and 25 non-patients. As expected, the schizophrenic patients show significant poorer performances in the theory of mind tasks and give significant fewer non self-referential explanations of social situations as both control groups. However, there is no significant correlation between both variables in the schizophrenic group, and the variables do not correlate with positive or negative symptoms of the schizophrenic disorder or with abnormalities of information processing.