Department of Clinical and Developmental Psychology, Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen, Germany.
J Affect Disord. 2011 Jul;132(1-2):104-11. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2011.02.010. Epub 2011 Mar 21.
Even though unipolar depression is associated with considerably impaired social functioning, only a few studies so far have investigated Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities of unipolar depressed patients. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to examine whether depressed patients are impaired in their ToM as compared to healthy controls. Thereby, both aspects of ToM, i.e. decoding and reasoning, are examined separately.
Acutely depressed patients with unipolar affective disorder (n=24) and healthy controls (n=20) were examined with the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test' (RMET) and the 'Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition' (MASC) to address the two aspects of ToM.
Patients compared to controls did not show impaired decoding ability in the RMET, but did show deficits in integrating contextual information about other people (reasoning) in the MASC. This impairment is independent of the mental state modality that had to be judged (emotional vs. cognitive).
Possible differences between the diagnostic subgroups of depression, which play an important role in clarifying the opposing results concerning the association between ToM abilities and depression in the existing literature, have not been examined.
It is possible that the low level of social functioning associated with depression can be ascribed partially to a ToM deficit and should be addressed in the treatment of depression.
尽管单相抑郁症与社交功能严重受损有关，但到目前为止，只有少数研究调查了单相抑郁患者的心理理论（ToM）能力。因此，本研究的主要目的是检验抑郁患者的 ToM 是否比健康对照组受损。为此，分别检查了 ToM 的两个方面，即解码和推理。
采用“读眼识人测验”（RMET）和“社会认知评估电影”（MASC）对急性单相情感障碍抑郁患者（n=24）和健康对照组（n=20）进行检查，以研究 ToM 的两个方面。
与对照组相比，患者在 RMET 中没有表现出解码能力受损，但在 MASC 中表现出整合有关他人的上下文信息（推理）的缺陷。这种损伤与要判断的心理状态模式（情绪与认知）无关。
可能没有检查抑郁的诊断亚组之间的差异，这些差异在阐明现有文献中 ToM 能力与抑郁之间的关联的相反结果方面起着重要作用。
抑郁患者的社交功能低下可能部分归因于 ToM 缺陷，在治疗抑郁时应予以重视。
