Eun-Young Lee

ObjectivesHostile attribution bias is reportedly common from non-clinical population to those with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and is known to be closely related to theory of mind. This study aimed to investigate whether ToM skills mediate the relationship among neurocognitive ability, personality traits, and attribution bias.MethodsA total of 198 non-clinical youths were recruited. To assess their neurocognitive ability and ToM skills, the participants were asked to complete Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices and the Korean version of the Reading the Mind in Eyes Test. To determine their personality traits, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and interpersonal reactivity index were used. To evaluate hostile attribution bias, the Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire was administered. Path analysis and bias-corrected percentile bootstrap methods were used to estimate model fit and the parameters of the mediating effects.ResultsBased on model comparison, the best model characterized two direct pathways from psychoticism and the K-RMET to hostility attribution bias and three indirect pathways, wherein SPM, perspective taking, and psychoticism influenced hostile attribution bias through K-RMET. The final model fit indices were good [x2/df = 1.126; comparative fit index = 0.996; root mean square error of approximation = 0.026; standard root mean square residual = 0.026 and Akaike information criterion = 28.251] and the K-RMET fully mediated the association between SPM, perspective taking, psychoticism, and hostile attribution bias.ConclusionThe main findings suggested that ToM skills, such as the RMET, play an important role in explaining the relationship among neurocognitive ability, personality traits, and hostile attribution bias. ToM skills and a remediation strategy may need to be developed to balance the enhanced hostility bias that underlies the paranoia.

In the movie Babette’s Feast a gastronomic poem transforms the inflexibility of political power into beautiful flavor. A popular Korean idiom hit like crashing Buk-Eu represents the catharsis against the injustice over the women from the machismo society, by a violent gesture at the moment of cooking. Touching the flesh gives an ambivalence of sensing between the horror of necrophagous human and the gustatory pleasure of eating the prey. As Gilles Deleuze says, the meat is the zone of indistinction and indetermination between the human being and the animal. This morbid and culinary touch finally converts our fear into the pleasure of flavor at the moment of tasting. After his Histoire de l’œil, Georges Bataille published an article in the journal Document written about the eye as a means of expressing « cannibal sweetmeat » where the ambivalent sense represents the fascination and the horror. The visual activity is limited to the jealousy, to the fierceness of unilateral seduction and excessively to the voyeurism. Our eye is an affective instance, which makes the desire and the horror meet each other.