Thirioux Bérangère, Tandonnet Louis, Jaafari Nematollah, Berthoz Alain
Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action, CNRS UMR 7152, Collège de France, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, Paris F-75005, France.
CIC INSERM U 802, CHU de Poitiers, Poitiers F-86022, France.
Brain Cogn. 2014 Oct;90:87-99. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2014.06.006. Epub 2014 Jul 9.
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.
行为学和神经影像学数据最近指出，共情（设身处地感受他人）与涉及自身和他人视觉空间视角的心理意象及转换有关。在精神分裂症患者中已观察到共情能力和视觉空间能力均受损。特别是，有人提出精神分裂症患者在自发模拟他人的第一人称体验方面存在改变。然而，迄今为止，关于精神分裂症中共情缺陷与自发异中心编码障碍之间的关系，仅有很少的证据。在本初步研究中，我们用精神分裂症患者测试了我们的行为范式，该范式能够从身体姿势和动作来判断，在生态上更有效的条件下，个体是通过自我中心——如在同情（与他人感同身受）中——还是异中心——如在共情中——视觉空间机制与另一个体进行互动。为此，10名患者和10名对照者站着并移动，与一个真人大小、同样站着并移动的虚拟走钢丝者进行互动。我们发现，在大多数情况下，阴性症状较重的患者在自发使用异中心视觉空间机制方面存在缺陷，并且优先采用自我中心参照与虚拟角色互动。相比之下，保留的自发异中心视觉空间策略与占主导的阴性或阳性症状学无关。我们的数据表明，精神分裂症中阴性症状的严重程度与自发（“在线”）共情加工障碍有关，同时自我报告的特质认知共情得分较低。
