Peveretou Foteini, Radke Sina, Derntl Birgit, Habel Ute
Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Faculty of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, Pauwelsstrasse 30, 52074 Aachen, Germany.
Jülich Aachen Research Alliance-BRAIN Institute I: Brain Structure-Function Relationships: Decoding the Human Brain at Systemic Levels, Research Center Jülich GmbH and RWTH Aachen University, Wilhelm-Johnen-Strasse, 52425 Jülich, Germany.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2020 Jan 24;10(2):41. doi: 10.3390/bs10020041.
Empathy is important for successful social interaction and maintaining relationships. Several studies detected impairments in empathic abilities in schizophrenia, with some even indicating a broader deficit in several components, including emotion recognition, perspective taking, and affective responsiveness. The aim of our study was to validate a short version of the previous empathy paradigm as a reliable and easily applicable method to assess empathic deficits in patients with schizophrenia potentially within clinical routine. To do so, we applied the short version to 30 patients (14 females) diagnosed with schizophrenia meeting the DSM-5 criteria and 30 well matched healthy controls (14 females). The data analysis indicates a significant empathic deficit in patients due to worse performance in all three domains. We managed to replicate most of the findings of our previous study. In contrary to the previous study, significant correlations between performance in the empathy tasks and psychopathology occurred: the severity of negative symptoms was negatively associated with performance in the emotion recognition task and the affective responsiveness task. Gender did not significantly affect performance in the empathy tasks. Regarding the results, our short empathy paradigm appears to be a valid method in assessing empathic impairments in schizophrenia that may be useful in clinical routine.
同理心对于成功的社交互动和维持人际关系很重要。多项研究发现精神分裂症患者的同理心能力存在缺陷，有些研究甚至表明在包括情绪识别、换位思考和情感反应在内的几个方面存在更广泛的缺陷。我们研究的目的是验证先前同理心范式的简短版本，作为一种可靠且易于应用的方法，可能在临床常规中评估精神分裂症患者的同理心缺陷。为此，我们将简短版本应用于30名符合DSM-5标准的精神分裂症患者（14名女性）和30名匹配良好的健康对照者（14名女性）。数据分析表明，由于在所有三个领域的表现较差，患者存在明显的同理心缺陷。我们成功复制了先前研究的大部分结果。与先前的研究相反，同理心任务表现与精神病理学之间存在显著相关性：阴性症状的严重程度与情绪识别任务和情感反应任务的表现呈负相关。性别对同理心任务的表现没有显著影响。就结果而言，我们的简短同理心范式似乎是评估精神分裂症患者同理心损伤的有效方法，可能在临床常规中有用。
