Abstract
Impaired mental state attribution is a core social cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study examined the extent to which the core neural system of mental state attribution is involved in mental state attribution, focusing on belief attribution and emotion attribution. Fifteen schizophrenia outpatients and 14 healthy controls performed two mental state attribution tasks in the scanner. In a Belief Attribution Task, after reading a short vignette, participants were asked infer either the belief of a character (a false belief condition) or a physical state of an affair (a false photograph condition). In an Emotion Attribution Task, participants were asked either to judge whether character(s) in pictures felt unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral emotion (other condition) or to look at pictures that did not have any human characters (view condition). fMRI data were analyzing focusing on a priori regions of interest (ROIs) of the core neural systems of mental state attribution: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and precuneus. An exploratory whole brain analysis was also performed. Both patients and controls showed greater activation in all four ROIs during the Belief Attribution Task than the Emotion Attribution Task. Patients also showed less activation in the precuneus and left TPJ compared to controls during the Belief Attribution Task. No significant group difference was found during the Emotion Attribution Task in any of ROIs. An exploratory whole brain analysis showed a similar pattern of neural activations. These findings suggest that while schizophrenia patients rely on the same neural network as controls do when attributing beliefs of others, patients did not show reduced activation in the key regions such as the TPJ. Further, this study did not find evidence for aberrant neural activation during emotion attribution or recruitment of compensatory brain regions in schizophrenia.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0165546 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016 Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
The authors would like to thank Poorang Nori and Mark McGee for assistance in data collection. fRMI data have been collected at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center (BMC) that has received generous support from the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, the Brain Mapping Support Foundation, the Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, the Tamkin Foundation, the Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, the Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, the Robson Family and the Northstar Fund.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization | |
| Brain Mapping Support Foundation | |
| Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation | |
| Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation | |
| Northstar Fund | |
| Pierson-Lovelace Foundation | |
| Tamkin Foundation | |
| University of California, Los Angeles |
