Breast cancer patients' reasoning ability is hampered by negative information

Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer in females. When diagnosed with BC, women face with a lot of negative, gender- and health-related threatening information. This may substantially hinder their cognitive and reasoning abilities, decision making (e.g., during informed consent, treatment options assessment), and eventually, coping with the disease. Negative gender-related information was shown to impede non-verbal social reasoning ability in healthy adults with a much greater impact on women (e.g., Pavlova et al. PLoS ONE 2014): Telling that men are usually better than women on the task drastically reduced women's performance. However, it is unknown if and to what extent BC patients' reasoning abilities are vulnerable to the effect of negative information. Here, we examined whether negative information would affect performance on the same social reasoning task (completion of depicted human actions) in female patients with mastocarcinoma (age, 40 – 55 years; initial diagnosis, no prior or current chemotherapy). Two groups of patients (N _P= 36) and two groups of matched healthy women (controls; N _C= 36) were administered the task either with standard neutral instruction or with additional negative information that “men are commonly better on the task". With negative information, BC patients scored not only lower than controls, but also lower than BC patients with standard instruction (P< 0.05). For the first time, the results show a strong impact of negative information on reasoning abilities in BC patients. The findings offer novel insights on improving physician-patient communication for enhanced care-related cognition, reasoning, and decision making, and better treatment outcomes in BC patients.