Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

how do we decipher others’ minds? 161
rather than to themselves (underattributions); second, patients may attribute
the actions or thoughts of others to themselves (overattributions). According
to the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1937), these false attributions
reflect the existence in each individual of a representation of others’ actions
and thoughts in addition to the representation of one’s own actions and
thoughts: false attributions were thus due to an imbalance between these
two representations. A typical example of underattribution is hallucination.
Hallucinating schizophrenic patients may show a tendency to project their
own experience onto external events. Accordingly, they may misattribute
their own intentions or actions to external agents. During auditory hallucinations,
the patient will hear voices that are typically experienced as coming
from a powerful external entity but in fact correspond to subvocal speech
produced by the patient (Gould, 1949; David, 1994). The voices offer comments
where the patient is addressed in the third person and which include
commands and directions for action (Chadwick & Birchwood, 1994). The
patient may declare that he or she is being acted upon by an alien force, as
if his or her thoughts or acts were controlled by an external agent. The socalled
mimetic behavior (where the patient compulsively imitates other
people) observed at the acute stage of psychosis also relates to this category.
The reverse pattern of misattribution can also be observed. Overattributions
were early described by Janet (1937): what this author called “excess of
appropriation” corresponds for the patient to the illusion that actions of others
are in fact initiated or performed by him- or herself and that he or she is
influencing other people (the clinical picture of megalomania). In this case,
patients are convinced that their intentions or actions can affect external events,
for example, that they can influence the thought and actions of other people.
Accordingly, they tend to misattribute the occurrence of external events to
themselves. The consequence of this misinterpretation would be that external
events are seen as the result expected from their own actions. More recently,
impairments in the recognition of others and the self in schizophrenia
have been categorized, together with other manifestations of this disease,
among the so-called first-rank symptoms. According to Schneider (1955), these
symptoms, which are considered critical for the diagnosis of schizophrenia,
refer to a state where patients interpret their own thoughts or actions as due
to alien forces or to other people and feel controlled or influenced by others.
First-rank symptoms might reflect the disruption of a mechanism which normally
generates consciousness of one’s own actions and thoughts and allows
their correct attribution to their author.
One possible explanation for these impairments in self-recognition could
be the dysfunction of a specific system for perceiving, recognizing, and attributing
actions. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that schizophrenic
patients with delusion of influence make frequent errors in experimental