In a recent article, published this year on the prestigious international magazine Behavior TherapyHezel and Mcnally evaluated the presence of deficit in mind theory In patients with social phobia. In addition, the authors tried to investigate whether they were also present difficulty in understanding the mental states of others, such as emotions, thoughts and intentions.
There social phobia It is a spread diagnosis with an annual incidence of 6.8% and a prevalence Lifetime of 12.1% in the American general population. People with this disorder have several cognitive bias, both processing, attentional, memonic and interpretative; They tend to evaluate themselves in a negative way and strongly distort the information about the judgment that others can express on them.
This type of mode has always suggested that i patients with social phobia may have problems of cognitive decentralization and representation of the mind of others.
In this study, with Mind theory (Tom) We mean the cognitive ability to identify and think about the mental state of other people (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). It is possible to consider two distinct processes: understanding and decoding the mental state of the other based on the observations immediately available; think about the mental state of the other to explain and predict behavior.
In this study, the authors compared the different performances between patients with social phobia and control group about the members of the Mind theory.
Both the group of patients with social phobia that the control was made up of 40 subjects. To investigate the Tom the Reading the Mind in the Eye (Mine) and the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MAP) were used.
The results showed how, in general, i patients with social phobia They have greater difficulties than the control group in passing Tom tests, in particular in grasping the other’s thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, social phobic subjects, compared to the control group, seem to consider the emotions of others more intense and attribute greater meaning and importance to what others think and feel; They also seem to have difficulty making inferences about the thoughts of other people.
Finally, the subjects with social phobia They seem to attribute thoughts and emotions in an incorrect way, as if the context was not considered. For example, in a task of Mas, when asked to imagine in the film, they tend to provide answers based on their behavior and not on that of the character, confirming a deficit of cognitive decentralization.
This article therefore offers an additional inspiration about the work areas in the social phobia psychotherapy.
Hezel, DM, & McNally, RJ (2014). Theory of Mind Impairements in Social Anxienty Disorder. Behavior Therapy, 45530-540.
