Abstract
The relationship between religiosity and different components of empathy was explored in schizophrenia patients. A total of 81 stable schizophrenia patients and 95 controls from the nearby community completed self-reported questionnaires assessing religiosity and empathy (through the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, IRI). Patients with schizophrenia showed higher religiousness than controls and they presented less perspective-taking and empathic concern but increased personal distress in IRI scores. Regression analyses unveiled an association between religiosity and perspective-taking in schizophrenics after adjusting for age, gender, and psychotic symptoms. In conclusion, religiosity in patients with schizophrenia may be linked to variations in perspective- taking as a component of empathy.
Highlights
Religiousness plays a salient role in the everyday lives of schizophrenia patients, their involvement in public religious activities is lower than that of the general population [1,2,3,4]
The interpersonal reactivity (IRI) comprises 28 items rated on a Likert-type scale that ranges from 1 (‘not at all like me’) to 5 (‘very much like me’). It measures cognitive and emotional empathy across four subscales, but our analyses focused on three IRI scales: Cognitive components—Perspective-Taking, Affective components—Empathic Concern, and Personal Distress
These patients showed differences in the three components of the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI): Lower perspective-taking and emphatic concern, as well as more personal distress than the comparison group (Table 1), agreeing with previous findings using similar measures [21,22,27,28,42]. These findings, did not provide robust enough evidence to sustain the conjecture of a singular deficit in affective empathy in schizophrenia [24,26,44,45]
Summary
Religiousness plays a salient role in the everyday lives of schizophrenia patients, their involvement in public religious activities is lower than that of the general population [1,2,3,4]. Research on religiosity and schizophrenia has mainly focused on delusions with religious content, linking transcendence ideation to psychopathology [5]. Religious delusion topics are persecutory (often devil or demons), grandiose (believing to be God, Jesus, or an angel), or related to worries of condemnation (unpardonable sins) [5,8]. Religious tendencies rest on beliefs or experiences regarding supernatural agents and thoughts/hopes about transcendence [9]. Mentalizing is a prerequisite for the appearance of the complex representations typically ascribed to Gods and other kinds of supernatural agents found in most religious beliefs [13]. Religious people tend to perceive God as an actual person rather than a fictional image, and several studies have shown that praying activates brain regions that are
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