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The present article addresses the professional conclusions of an international platform of education in intercultural discourse in the European Union's EDUC Project. In flagging social issues and concerns, cross-cultural academic collaboration is a powerful tool to bring about social change . In our educational project participants encounter different cultures, so the discussed topics, and especially the metaphors for the Covid-19 pandemic, receive instant reflections from different cultural perspectives , multiplying the potential sphere of valid interpretations , yielding novel perspectives in intercultural pragmatics and communication. This gives birth to a novel methodology that builds on the open-minded integration of different points of view, understanding universal traits of human cognition and differences in culture in the linguistics of discourse., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

This article explores a novel methodology in the globalized classroom to face and tackle new challenges across cultures. The new online educational form of international discourse has the potential to make a difference in and outside Academia as it encompasses interpersonal communication across cultures and thus offers a novel framework for interpretation of different sociocultural perspectives to bring about social change. It transcends geographical and physical boundaries as it brings people together for discussion in the online joint event. Our study guides the reader through a collaborative educational framework and offers a methodology that transcends boundaries, exemplifying a tool for 21st century education. It offers techniques that bring on social change and enhances open-mindedness in tackling social problems with valuable methods from the fields of humanities and intercultural, collaborative communication., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

In this study we have examined a group of schizophrenia patients during the understanding of irony tasks, who had normal IQ. 14 patients and 14 healthy control subjects were included, 15 irony and 15 control tasks were invertigated during an fMRI investigation. During the contextual phase patients had shown a higher activitation in different brain regions. The healthy controls had shown deactivitation during this phase, while this couldn't be seen in the patiens group. During the irony phase healthy subjects activated brain regions known as mentalisation areas, while patients didn't. Our results can support the view, that behind schizophrenia patients mentalisation deficit the contextual phase can play the central role.

Schizophrenic patients have Theory of Mind (ToM) deficits even during remission, but it is yet unknown whether this could be influenced. We examined the neural correlates of irony understanding in schizophrenic patients, as an indicator of ToM capacity, and evaluated how linguistic help inserted into the context phase could affect irony comprehension. Schizophrenic patients in remission and healthy controls were subjected to event-related functional MRI scanning while performing irony, 'irony with linguistic help', and control tasks. Patients understood irony significantly worse than healthy controls. The patients showed stronger brain activity in the parietal and frontal areas in the early phase of irony task, however the healthy controls exhibited higher activation in frontal, temporal and parietal regions in the latter phase of the irony task. Interestingly the linguistic help not only improved the patients' ToM performance, but it also evoked similar activation pattern to healthy controls., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

In this paper, we review the literature about the theory of mind (ToM) deficits in patients with bipolar disorder. According to several studies, bipolar patients have remarkable ToM deficits not only in manic and depressive periods, but even in remission. However, results on the association with the symptom severity and basic neurocognitive (especially executive) functions are controversial. Taken together, ToM deficits seem to be state dependent trait markers of the bipolar disorder. Some authors suggest that ToM deficits can influence the functional outcome. Therefore, the better understanding of ToM deficits in bipolar disorder is of particular importance. In the second part of the paper we review the methodological issues, and provide a possible guideline for the study of ToM in bipolar disorders. Illness specific considerations of the neuroimaging research, the ToM task used in the experiment, the experimental design, and the data analysis are particularly emphasized.