Disturbances of spontaneous empathic processing relate with the severity of the negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia: a behavioural pilot-study using virtual reality technology.

Behavioural and neuroimaging data have recently pointed out that empathy (feeling into someone else) is associated with mental imagery and transformation related to one's and other's visuo-spatial perspectives. Impairments of both empathic and visuo-spatial abilities have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. Especially, it has been suggested that schizophrenics are altered in spontaneously simulating another individual's first-person experience.