Abstract

Objective: The aim of study is to investigate whether there is a deficit about Theory of Mind (ToM) skills of adolescents diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) compared to healthy control group and to examine the association between ToM deficit and variables such as OCD severity and clinical characteristics of OCD.Method:This study included 30 adolescents between 12-16 ages who were diagnosed with OCD according to DSM-V and 30 adolescents without any psychiatric diagnosis.Sociodemographic characteristics of cases were evaluated with detailed form;in addition, neuropsychological tests were applied to investigate Development of Intelligence and Theory of Mind skills. Turkish version of Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age-Children Present and lifetime version ,Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale,Children's Depression Inventory and Childhood Anxiety Screening Scale were applied in order to assess psychopathology.Intelligence level of patients was assessed with Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised;while ToM skills were evaluated with Hinting Task Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and false belief tasks such as Sally-Anne Test, Smarties Test, Chocolate Bar Task and Ice-Cream Truck Task.Results: It was determined that adolescents with OCD tended to fail in false belief tasks and that the increase in OCD symptom severity didn’t affect ToM test performance.Conclusions: Due to limited number of patients,our findings couldn’t be generalized to all OCD diagnosed adolescents; therefore it is thought that there is a need for more extensive studies in this area.

Key words: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Theory of mind, False Belief