Intuitive physics and intuitive psychology (“theory of mind”) in offspring of mothers with psychoses
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- social cognition, folk psychology, schizophrenia, theory of mind, bipolar disorder
- Copyright
- © 2014 Marothi et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Intuitive physics and intuitive psychology (“theory of mind”) in offspring of mothers with psychoses. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e248v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.248v1
Abstract
Offspring of individuals with psychoses sometimes display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of children of mothers with schizophrenia (n=28) and bipolar disorder (n=23) to understand mental states of others using the Eyes Test (folk psychology or “theory of mind”) and physical causal interactions of inanimate objects (folk psychics). Compared with healthy controls (n=29), the children of mothers with schizophrenia displayed significantly impaired performances on the Eyes Test but not on the folk physics test. The children of mothers with bipolar disorder did not differ from the controls and outperformed the children of mothers with schizophrenia on the folk physics test. These results suggest that the attribution of mental states, but not the interpretation of causal interaction of objects, is impaired in offspring of individuals with schizophrenia, which may contribute to social dysfunctions.