ArticlePsychological medicine2025
Contributions of the posterior cerebellum to mentalizing and social functioning: A transdiagnostic investigation.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Depression symptoms relate to altered brain connectivity and behavioral responses during self-referential judgments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Spatial and temporal connectivity of brain resting-state fMRI during music-induced analgesia in fibromyalgia patients.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Irony comprehension in first-degree relatives of patients with bipolar affective disorder - a preliminary fMRI study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMentalizing-our ability to make inferences about the mental states of others-is impaired across psychiatric disorders and robustly associated with functional outcomes. Mentalizing deficits have been prominently linked to aberrant activity in cortical regions considered to be part of the "social brain network" (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction), yet emerging evidence also suggests the importance of cerebellar dysfunction. In the present study-using a transdiagnostic, clinical psychiatric sample spanning the psychosis-autism-social anxiety spectrums-we examined the role of the cerebellum in mentalizing and its unique contributions to broader social functioning.
methodsSixty-two participants (38 with significant social dysfunction secondary to psychiatric illness and 24 nonclinical controls without social dysfunction) completed a mentalizing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. General linear model analysis, latent variable modeling, and regression analyses were used to examine the contribution of cerebellum activation to the prediction of group status and social functioning.
resultsMentalizing activated a broad set of social cognitive brain regions, including cerebral mentalizing network (MN) nodes and posterior cerebellum. Higher posterior cerebellum activation significantly predicted clinical status (i.e., individuals with psychiatric disorders versus nonclinical controls). Finally, cerebellar activation accounted for significant variance in social functioning independent of all other cerebral MN brain regions identified in a whole-brain analysis.
conclusionsFindings add to an accumulating body of evidence establishing the unique role of the posterior cerebellum in mentalizing deficits and social dysfunction across psychiatric illnesses. Collectively, our results suggest that the posterior cerebellum should be considered - alongside established cerebral regions - as part of the mentalizing network.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.