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.
Schizophrenia research
July 1, 2024
Vittorio Gallese, Martina Ardizzi, Francesca Ferroni
18 citations
Schizophrenia is often explained by neurotransmitter or genetic abnormalities, but an alternative view sees it as a disorder of the self, marked by anomalous self-experience and awareness. This perspective can guide empirical research into the bodily and neurobiological changes underlying the condition. Recent evidence on the bodily self—a minimal sense of self rooted in the body and its motor potentialities—is reviewed. Findings show that anomalies in brain-body functions, particularly multisensory integration and the differential processing of self- versus other-related bodily information, may disrupt self-experience and blur the self-other distinction in schizophrenia. These disruptions likely underlie the self-disorders characteristic of the syndrome.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)
June 1, 2025
Francesca Ferroni, Edoardo Arcuri, Martina Ardizzi et al.
7 citations
Depersonalisation (DP) involves a distressing feeling of being detached from oneself and a flattened sense of time. This study examined how DP experiences affect perception of peripersonal space (the space near the body) and time. Using an audio-tactile task, no difference in peripersonal space perception was found between people with high versus low DP experiences. A mental time travel task revealed that individuals with high DP experiences performed worse overall at locating events in time relative to their present reference point, while those with low DP experiences showed significant variation in performance for past events. The findings link altered self-awareness to disrupted egocentric spatiotemporal perception.