Theory of mind and context processing in schizophrenia: the role of social knowledge.

International audienceA deficit in social cognition is one of the most disabling clinical characteristics of schizophrenia including theory of mind, emotion processing, social perception and attributional bias (Couture et al., 2006). For this reason, social cognition has become a high priority domain of research to study schizophrenia (Green et al., 2008). The inability to infer intentions and beliefs of others has been supposed to result from their inability to use contextual information (Hardy-Baylé et al., 2003; Green et al., 2005). However, despite increasing evidence for impaired context processing, there has been little research into the relevance of these deficits for an understanding of social cognition, particularly ToM, in schizophrenia. It was also suggested that several factors such as level of incongruity between context and speaker's utterance, prosody, or character's features set in the stimulus situation cue the comprehension of the ironic intent among healthy subjects (Ivanko and Pexman, 2003). The aim of this study was to determine whether stereotypes (type of speaker's occupation) were social factors that cue comprehension of ironic intent in schizophrenia