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Introduction: Being able to understand other people's emotions and intentions is crucial for social interactions and well-being. Deficits in theory of mind (ToM) functioning hamper this ability and have been observed in depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders. However, results of previous research in depression have been inconclusive, possibly due to the presence of comorbid disorders and the disregarding of other modulating factors., Methods: Thirty-eight patients with a major depressive disorder (MDD) and forty healthy matched controls were assessed with a ToM task using animated triangles. Results were correlated with attachment styles, empathy abilities and neurocognitive performance., Results: Our findings show that 1) healthy female controls performed significantly stronger on the ToM task than female MDD patients, 2) these performance differences were driven by attachment styles and 3) depression severity did not impact task performance., Limitations: The pharmacological treatment of the majority of patients might limit the generalizability of this study., Discussion: Results indicate a gender-specific impact of attachment styles on ToM performance. Future studies should investigate whether impairments in social cognitive tasks pose a risk factor for depression and/or interactional styles or vice versa. Moreover, with regard to remediation programs gender-specific needs should be taken into account., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Functional imaging studies have used numerous neurocognitive designs to investigate brain activation during theory of mind (ToM) tasks in patients with schizophrenia. The majority of studies asks participants to retrospectively attribute mental states to others. We used a novel animated task to investigate implicit mentalizing online. Because behavioral studies have revealed slower ToM performance reaction times in patients with schizophrenia, we hypothesized that time would influence functional MRI (fMRI) activation patterns also., Methods: We applied the "Moving Shapes" paradigm, which involves two interacting triangles, to a functional MRI block design and investigated the neural activation patterns of 15 patients with schizophrenia and 14 healthy controls. We additionally analyzed the first and second halves of each video separately to assess time-related differences., Results: Overall, patients with schizophrenia showed increased activation in the inferior and middle frontal gyri, the superior temporal gyrus, the precuneus and the cerebellum compared with controls during ToM versus non-ToM videos. Most importantly, patients with schizophrenia had predominantly increased activation in ToM-related brain areas during the second half of the ToM paradigm, whereas the activation in areas of the ToM-network in healthy controls occurred during the first half of the presentation., Conclusions: Our results confirm recent findings of significantly stronger neural activations that encompass the fronto-temporo-parietal cerebral areas in patients with schizophrenia compared with controls during ToM tasks. The observation of slower cognitive processing in patients with schizophrenia during mentalizing might explain some of the contradictory imaging findings in these patients and have implications for cognitive remediation., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Introduction: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in schizophrenia found altered brain activation patterns during Theory of Mind (ToM) task performance in the so-called ToM-network, recently focusing on over- rather than under-activation. Even though most fMRI-studies applied tasks that might gradually activate the ToM-network, no study so far has investigated the time-course of ToM-performance. Some of the varying activation results might thus be due to time-course of performance. Aim: Our aim was to investigate neural activation over time in schizophrenia compared with a healthy control sample. Methods: Using a block design in fMRI, we presented a sophisticated paradigm that depicts moving geometrical shapes interacting in social patterns. 14 patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy controls participated in the study. Functional activation patterns were investigated for the first and second half of the videos separately. Results: Both groups activated brain areas related to the ToM-network during performance of ToM videos as compared to a baseline condition. Most importanly, schizophrenia patients showed activation in ToM-related brain areas only in the second part, while healthy controls activated the ToM-network in the first part of the video presentation. Conclusions: Results confirm recent findings of an increased activation in ToM-related brain areas in schizophrenia. Moreover, patients activated ToM-related brain areas later than healthy controls. This delay might be due to a general cognitive slowing, symptom-related inhibition of cognition-associated processes or specific delay in task processing. As this is the first study to investigate this time-course of ToM, more research is needed to classify results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]