Previous studies have found deficits in imaginative elaboration and social inference to be associated with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC; Renteria-Vasquez et al., 2022; Turk et al., 2009). In the current study, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) responses from a neurotypical control group and a group of individuals with ACC were used to further study the capacity for imaginative elaboration and story coherence.

Topic modeling was employed utilizing Latent Diritchlet Allocation to characterize the narrative responses to the pictures used in the TAT. A measure of the difference between models (perplexity) was used to compare the topics of the responses of individual participants to the common core model derived from the responses of the control group. Story coherence was tested using sentence-to-sentence Latent Semantic Analysis.

Group differences in perplexity were statistically significant overall, and for each card individually (p < .001). There were no differences between the groups in story coherence.

TAT narratives from persons with ACC were normally coherent, but more conventional (i.e., more similar to the core text) compared to those of neurotypical controls. Individuals with ACC can make conventional social inferences about socially ambiguous stimuli, but are restricted in their imaginative elaborations, resulting in less topical variability (lower perplexity values) compared to neurotypical controls.

Maladaptive defense mechanisms can play a role in maintaining the inadequate social and psychological adaptation of patients.

This study aims to establish if denial is one of the central psychological defense mechanisms in patients with somatoform disorder.

10 female patients at Moscow Clinical hospital №33 with somatoform disorder and panic attacks (aged 20 to 43) and 20 female participants of the control group (aged 19 to 35) were presented with 10 pictures of the Thematic Apperception Test. Pictures were previously annotated into 4 groups: neutral stimuli (2, 6GF), provoking self-blame / depression ideation stimuli (3GF,14, 15, 17GF), provoking aggression ideation stimuli (8ВМ, 18 GF, 9GF), provoking aggression/self-blame ideation stimuli (13 MF). We conducted content analyses of stories. Mann-Whitney U-test was used.

Table 1 presents analyses categories, examples of stories, and group differences.Table 1

Patients with the somatoform disorder tended to use descriptions without interpersonal or internal conflicts and/or to deny any characters‘ negative intentions or the negative consequences of their actions.

No significant relationships.