Psychopathology
January 1, 2021
Julie Nordgaard, Mads Gram Henriksen, Lennart Jansson et al.
52 citations
The concept of disordered selfhood in schizophrenia reemerged around the year 2000. In 2005, the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE) was published as a psychometric tool. This article traces the historical background of the EASE, explains the idea of a disorder of the basic or minimal self using phenomenological philosophy, and describes the clinical signs the EASE targets. The authors share their own experience using and teaching the EASE and review the empirical evidence gathered so far. They argue that basic self-disorder is a key phenotype of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, offering a path for empirical research into causes and for psychotherapeutic treatment.
Schizophrenia research
April 1, 2020
Karl Erik Sandsten, Julie Nordgaard, Troels Wesenberg Kjaer et al.
45 citations
Patients with schizophrenia often report not recognizing themselves in the mirror, a form of self-alienation. Using the Enfacement Illusion, a multisensory paradigm that manipulates self-other facial recognition through visuo-tactile stimulation, this study compared 35 patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy matched controls. At baseline, patients showed a significant skew toward perceiving another person's face as their own. After both synchronous and asynchronous visuo-tactile stimulation, patients' self-recognition was significantly altered compared to baseline. In contrast, healthy controls only showed altered self-recognition after synchronous stimulation, consistent with prior research. The findings suggest that temporal factors in multisensory integration may contribute to altered self-recognition in schizophrenia.
European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience
April 1, 2026
Lars Siersbæk Nilsson, Julie Nordgaard, Mads Gram Henriksen et al.
5 citations
Poor insight in schizophrenia is linked to fundamental alterations in the structure of subjective experience, known as self-disorders, rather than to other symptoms or general intelligence. In a study of 67 patients with schizophrenia or non-affective psychosis in a non-acute phase, those with impaired insight had significantly higher levels of self-disorders than those with good insight, while positive, negative, and depressive symptoms did not differ between groups. Regression analyses showed that only self-disorders were significantly associated with impaired insight. These findings support the idea that self-disorders contribute to poor insight, which may inform early intervention and treatment.
Schizophrenia research
June 2, 2025
Maria Chiara Piani, Martin Jandl, Thomas Koenig et al.
3 citations
Self-disorders, which disrupt the basic sense of being a conscious subject, are central to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Using 7 Tesla fMRI, 27 patients and 32 healthy controls performed a trait-judgment task probing pre-reflective and reflective self-experience. Greater severity of self-disorders correlated with reduced activity in the rostral posterior cingulate cortex during the pre-reflective component. During reflective self-experience, healthy controls showed bilateral frontopolar cortex activation, while patients engaged the left caudate, right frontopolar cortex, and left language area, suggesting patients rely more on analytical networks and deeper brain structures rather than the interoceptive processes typical of healthy controls.
Psychopathology
April 27, 2026
Mads Gram Henriksen, Håvard Hovstad, Helena Cobanovic et al.
The Inventory of Psychotic-Like Anomalous Self-Experiences (IPASE), a self-report questionnaire, was compared with the semi-structured clinical interview Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE) in 41 participants (including patients with psychosis or schizotypal disorder, other mental disorders, and healthy controls). IPASE and EASE total scores were moderately correlated (Spearman's ρ = 0.54), sharing about 29% variance. Qualitative analysis revealed that IPASE item endorsements often reflected ordinary experiences, medication effects, or psychotic symptoms rather than the subtle self-disorders captured by the EASE. The results indicate that IPASE and EASE do not measure the same construct, raising serious doubts about IPASE's validity for assessing self-disorders and emphasizing the need for phenomenological interviewing.
Frontiers in psychiatry
January 1, 2026
Søren Esben Rytter Heilskov, Julie Nordgaard, Unn Kristin Haukvik et al.
Delusions are often used as key evidence of psychosis in insanity assessments because they are verbalized and express faulty reality judgments. However, psychosis can also involve disturbances that are enacted rather than spoken. This paper revisits Klaus Conrad's concept of "senseless actions"—unintelligible behaviors seen in early schizophrenia—and illustrates its forensic relevance through a historical case study from Karl Wilmanns. These actions reflect a global disruption in how a person finds relevance, meaning, and constraint in the world, and may signal the transition from prodromal to manifest psychosis. The authors argue that evaluating such actions requires contextual and biographical information, and that the concept, though imperfect, can help identify reality disturbances overlooked in current forensic practice.
L'Encephale
August 1, 2025
Andreas Rosén Rasmussen, Helene Stephensen, Julie Nordgaard et al.
A French translation of the Examination of Anomalous Fantasy and Imagination (EAFI) is presented, along with an introduction to the phenomenology of imagination and its experiential alterations. The EAFI's interrater reliability was tested in a diagnostically heterogeneous sample of 20 inpatients, yielding agreement from 0.6 to 1.0 with an average κ of 0.84, and internal consistency (Cronbach's α) above 0.88. The anomalies of imagination explored by the EAFI are suggested to reflect an alteration of the structure of consciousness and belong to a fundamental, generative layer of psychopathology, with potential relevance for differential diagnosis, especially in first-contact patients.