[Empathy in severe mental disorders]

Empathy is a sub-process of social cognition that is defined as the capacity to understand and share another person's thoughts, wishes and feelings, and is crucial in many forms of adaptive social interaction. It is a contextual, flexible and multidimensional phenomenon that is related with different neuronal networks and processes.

To assess empathy in a sample of subjects diagnosed with conditions belonging to the category of severe mental disorders who were under treatment in a psychosocial rehabilitation programme.

The sample consisted of 22 persons with severe mental disorders receiving treatment consisting in a psychosocial rehabilitation programme, and 22 healthy controls. A battery of tests, including the empathy quotient, Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and the interpersonal reactivity index, was administered to each subject.

In the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the experimental group scored significantly lower than the control group (t = 2.8; p < 0.05). No statistically significant differences were found on the other variables.

Persons with a severe mental disorder do not display a generalised deficit of empathy. They do, however, have difficulty when it comes to recognising emotional states by looking, which suggests they process information about faces in a different way to subjects in the normal population.