Abstract
Offspring of individuals with psychoses sometimes display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of children of mothers with schizophrenia (n = 28) and bipolar disorder (n = 23) to understand mental states of others using the Eyes Test (folk psychology or “theory of mind”) and physical causal interactions of inanimate objects (folk physics). Compared with healthy controls (n = 29), the children of mothers with schizophrenia displayed significantly impaired performances on the Eyes Test but not on the folk physics test when corrected for IQ. The children of mothers with bipolar disorder did not differ from the controls. The folk physics test showed a significant covariance with IQ, whereas the Eyes Test did not exhibit such covariance. These results suggest that the attribution of mental states, but not the interpretation of causal interaction of objects, is impaired in offspring of individuals with schizophrenia, which may contribute to social dysfunctions.
Highlights
Several studies provided evidence that offspring of individuals with schizophrenia display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions (Niemi et al, 2003)
We addressed the following questions: (i) Are folk psychology and folk physics affected in the children of mothers with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? (ii) Are the offspring of individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder impaired relative to controls with negative family history for psychotic disorders? Our hypothesis was that children of mothers with schizophrenia would display a significant and generalized deficit in both folk psychology and folk physics tests, whereas the children of mothers with bipolar disorder would be much less severely affected (Murray et al, 2004)
The analysis of variance (ANOVA) conducted on the folk psychology and folk physics performances indicated significant main effects of group (F(2,77) = 9.8, p < .001) and task type (F(1,77) = 97.42,p < .001)
Summary
Several studies provided evidence that offspring of individuals with schizophrenia display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions (Niemi et al, 2003). In spite of extensive research in the field, the basic mechanisms of social and cognitive impairments in children of individuals with psychoses are poorly understood. To elucidate this issue, we selected the evolutionary framework of folk psychology and folk physics, which is based on the classification of objects in our environment as agents and non-agents (Dennett, 1987; Sperber, Premack & Premack, 1995; Csibra et al, 1999; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001).
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