title: Disturbances of spontaneous empathic processing relate with the severity of the negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia: a behavioural pilot-study using virtual reality technology.
abstract: Behavioural and neuroimaging data have recently pointed out that empathy (feeling into someone else) is associated with mental imagery and transformation related to one's and other's visuo-spatial perspectives. Impairments of both empathic and visuo-spatial abilities have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. Especially, it has been suggested that schizophrenics are altered in spontaneously simulating another individual's first-person experience. However, there is so far only little evidence regarding the relationship between deficits in empathy and disturbances in spontaneous heterocentered coding in schizophrenia. In the present pilot-study, we tested with schizophrenic patients our behavioural paradigm that enables to measure from the bodily postures and movements whether individuals in ecologically more valid conditions are interacting with another individual by using egocentered - as in sympathy (feeling with someone else) - or heterocentered - as in empathy - visuo-spatial mechanisms. For that, ten patients and ten controls, standing and moving, interacted with a virtual tightrope walker, displayed life-sized, standing and moving as well. We show that patients with higher negative symptoms had, in most cases, deficits in spontaneously using heterocentered visuo-spatial mechanisms and employed preferentially an egocentered referencing to interact with the avatar. In contrast, preserved spontaneous heterocentered visuo-spatial strategies were not linked to a prevailing negative or positive symptomatology. Our data suggest that the severity of the negative symptoms in schizophrenia relates with disturbances of spontaneous ("on-line") empathic processing in association with lower scoring self-reported trait cognitive empathy.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action, CNRS UMR 7152, Collège de France, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, Paris F-75005, France. Electronic address: berangerethirioux@hotmail.com.
authors.forename: Bérangère
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Thirioux
authors.affiliation: CIC INSERM U 802, CHU de Poitiers, Poitiers F-86022, France.
authors.forename: Louis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Tandonnet
authors.affiliation: CIC INSERM U 802, CHU de Poitiers, Poitiers F-86022, France; INSERM U 1084, Experimental and Clinical Neurosciences Laboratory, Poitiers F-86022, France; Université de Poitiers, Faculté de Médecine, Poitiers F-86022, France; Unité de Recherche Clinique intersectorielle en psychiatrie à vocation régionale (URC) du Centre Hospitalier Henri Laborit, Poitiers F-86022, France; Groupement de Recherche, CNRS 3557, France.
authors.forename: Nematollah
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jaafari
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action, CNRS UMR 7152, Collège de France, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, Paris F-75005, France.
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Berthoz
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D012919:Social Behavior; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Empathy; Executive functions; Inhibitory processing; Negative symptoms; Schizophrenia; Sympathy