ArticleSchizophrenia research. Cognition2021
Sexual abuse and physical neglect in childhood are associated with affective theory of mind in adults with schizophrenia.
Article in Schizophrenia research. Cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shadow of trauma: impaired mentalization in clinical populations - a systematic review.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Examining associations, moderators and mediators between childhood maltreatment, social functioning, and social cognition in psychotic disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychological medicine · 2023Pooled it
- Childhood maltreatment impacts the activity of the neural empathy but not theory of mind network: findings from a transdiagnostic sample.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Article
- Exploring the relationships between Early Childhood Adversity, Social Cognition, and Aggression in a South African Study of People Living with Schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2025Review
- The role of metacognition and social cognition in childhood trauma effecting on prognosis: 1-year follow-up study in patients with first-episode schizophrenia.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Uncinate fasciculus microstructural organisation and emotion recognition in schizophrenia: controlling for hit rate bias.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Child maltreatment, migration and risk of first-episode psychosis: results from the multinational EU-GEI study.Psychological medicine · 2023Article
- Impact of adverse childhood experiences on educational achievements in young people at clinical high risk of developing psychosis.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2023Article
- Adverse childhood experiences in patients with schizophrenia: related factors and clinical implications.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Higher order theory of mind in patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2022Article
- Preliminary Evidence for Anhedonia as a Marker of Sexual Trauma in Female Adolescents.Adolescent health, medicine and therapeutics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Whereas childhood trauma is associated with reduced nonsocial cognition in schizophrenia, research on the relationship between childhood trauma and social cognition is limited and mixed. The aim of this study was to examine the association between childhood trauma and theory of mind (ToM) in persons with schizophrenia (n = 68) compared to healthy control participants (n = 70). Childhood trauma was assessed with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), providing information on physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect and emotional neglect. ToM was indexed by the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), which yields scores for total, cognitive and affective ToM, and for three error types (overmentalizing, undermentalizing, no mentalizing). Persons with schizophrenia had elevated rates of childhood trauma and lower ToM scores than healthy controls. In the schizophrenia group, associations between sexual abuse and affective ToM was statistically significant. In regression analyses, physical neglect was found to be the strongest predictor of affective ToM. In healthy controls, childhood trauma was not associated with ToM. Follow-up analyses comparing individuals with/without clinically significant childhood trauma, confirmed the findings for the schizophrenia group. No causal inferences can be made in this cross-sectional study, but the results suggest an illness-specific association between both sexual abuse and physical neglect in childhood, and adult affective ToM in individuals with schizophrenia.
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