Schizophrenia bulletin
March 15, 2023
Chi C Chan, Raquel Norel, Carla Agurto et al.
22 citations
Disturbances in self-experience—the sense of being the subject of one's own experiences and actions, and of being distinct from others—are central to schizophrenia. Traditionally assessed by manual interview rating, this study used natural language processing to analyze autobiographical narratives from 167 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 90 healthy controls, totaling 490,000 words. Topics related to self-experience and agency were significantly more expressed in patients than controls and were decoupled from emotional tone, semantic coherence, and burden-related concepts. A classifier trained on these features discriminated patients from controls with an AUC of 0.80. These findings demonstrate that NLP can automatically detect higher-order metacognitive aspects of self-experience without explicit probing.
Schizophrenia bulletin
September 1, 2022
Peter Moseley, Adam Powell, Angela Woods et al.
15 citations
Voice-hearing in people with psychosis and in nonclinical spiritualist communities shows important similarities and differences. Nonclinical voice-hearers report less distress and more control over their voices, consistent with prior findings. They also often integrate multiple sensory modalities into a single entity, experience high levels of associated visual imagery, and perceive voices in locations that differ in relation to perceptual boundaries. Most nonclinical voice-hearers reported hearing voices before encountering spiritualism, indicating that onset was not solely due to deliberate practice. The study suggests that understanding how spiritual voice-hearers cultivate and control voices after onset may inform interventions for distressing voices in psychosis.
Schizophrenia bulletin
May 25, 2025
Andrea Raballo, Mads Gram Henriksen, Michele Poletti et al.
9 citations
Self-disorders—non-psychotic anomalous self-experiences—cluster specifically in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, including familial high-risk groups. Over three decades, the concept has matured from clinical observations into a defined research domain. Self-disorders serve as a quantifiable trait phenotype for genetic liability and as a risk phenotype that precedes overt symptoms like schizotypal features and positive, negative, and disorganized symptoms. This framework offers insights into the nature of these conditions and holds promise for improving diagnostic accuracy, prognostic assessments, and intervention targets.
Schizophrenia bulletin
February 24, 2023
Salma M Khaled, Sanne G Brederoo, Arij Yehya et al.
8 citations
Hallucinations in nonclinical populations are shaped by culture. Comparing Dutch and Qatari adults (2,999 each) on the Questionnaire for Psychotic Experiences, tactile and olfactory hallucinations occurred at similar lifetime rates in both countries. Auditory and visual hallucinations were twice as common in the Dutch sample, and Dutch participants reported younger ages of onset for auditory and tactile hallucinations. Although Qatari participants reported fewer auditory and visual hallucinations overall, those who experienced them had higher mean scores for past-week hallucinations, more impact on daily functioning, and more frequent commanding voices. The findings suggest hallucinations in the Qatari sample carried greater clinical relevance, with implications for early screening and prevention.
Schizophrenia bulletin
August 27, 2024
Bianca Bianciardi, Helena Mastek, Michelle Franka et al.
6 citations
A systematic review of 15 preclinical and 3 human studies found that NMDA receptor antagonists reduce evoked gamma-band power and intertrial phase coherence in auditory processing, while sometimes increasing baseline gamma-band activity. These changes partially match the reductions in gamma-band spectral power and intertrial phase coherence observed in 37 studies of schizophrenia patients and 9 studies of early-stage psychosis. However, baseline gamma-band findings were inconsistent across studies, and a publication bias was noted in the schizophrenia patient literature. The results support the idea that NMDA receptor hypofunction contributes to altered excitation/inhibition balance and auditory gamma-band deficits in schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia bulletin
November 10, 2025
Elahe Arani, Simona Garobbio, Maya Roinishvili et al.
3 citations
People with schizophrenia rely less on prior experiences when interpreting visual stimuli, leading to faster perceptual switches in a bistable perception task called Structure-from-Motion (SfM). In the intermittent version of this task, patients with schizophrenia and their unaffected siblings showed significantly higher alternation rates than healthy controls, while patients with depression had the lowest alternation rates. In the continuous version, only patients with schizophrenia had shorter percept durations. The intermittent SfM paradigm may serve as an endophenotype for schizophrenia, reflecting altered adaptation or cross-inhibition mechanisms that affect prior processing.
Schizophrenia bulletin
October 6, 2025
Charles Fernyhough, Janna De Boer, Paige E Davis et al.
3 citations
Hallucinations, which occur in many psychiatric disorders, may be better understood through the lens of developmental psychology. Their clinical significance depends on when they appear in a person's life. Key cognitive-developmental processes—such as engaging with imaginary entities, adverse events, executive functioning, social cognition, and language development—shape how hallucinations arise across different sensory modalities. Atypical developmental trajectories, as seen in certain conditions, also influence hallucination prevalence and phenomenology. Integrating developmental and psychiatric perspectives could yield mutual benefits for future research.
Schizophrenia bulletin
November 16, 2024
Inge Hahne, Marco Zierhut, Niklas Bergmann et al.
3 citations
A yoga-based group intervention (YoGI) added to treatment-as-usual is feasible and acceptable for inpatients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). In a randomized controlled trial with 50 inpatients, YoGI plus treatment-as-usual showed 95% protocol adherence, 91-94% retention, and a 6% dropout rate. Compared to treatment-as-usual alone, the yoga group had significant improvements in positive symptoms, depression, cognitive fusion, and a mindfulness subscale. Medium-to-large improvements were also seen in body mindfulness, negative and general symptoms, anxiety, stress, quality of life, and attention. No severe adverse events occurred. The findings suggest YoGI may provide benefits beyond standard care, but further robust trials are needed.
Schizophrenia bulletin
June 17, 2025
Daphne J Holt, Rachel Sussman, Daniel Johnson et al.
1 citation
A four-session group-based Resilience Training (RT) program focusing on mindfulness skills reduced symptoms of psychosis and depression in 103 young adults with mild-to-moderate psychotic experiences or depressive symptoms. Participants showed increased mindfulness skills, decreased emotion reactivity, and reduced transdiagnostic symptoms after training. In a subset of 41 participants who underwent fMRI, training was associated with increased functional connectivity between the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The decrease in emotion reactivity fully mediated the link between skill acquisition and symptom reduction, suggesting that RT improves mental health by enhancing stress management. The findings support emotion reactivity as a target for preventive interventions.
Schizophrenia bulletin
April 10, 2026
Cherise Rosen, Liping Tong, Julia G Lebovitz et al.
Depersonalization (DP) and derealization (DR) are alterations in sense of self and lifeworld that often co-occur in psychosis. Over 20 years, the Chicago Longitudinal Study examined these phenomena across psychiatric categories. DP was broadly distributed across diagnoses, while DR showed greater specificity to schizophrenia. Network analyses revealed three foundational constructs in schizophrenia: alteration in sense of self/lifeworld, multisensory experiences, and bodily experiences; bodily and multisensory alterations were foundational in affective-psychosis. Self-disturbance emerged as foundational only in schizophrenia. The findings support reframing DP and DR as points on a continuum of attenuated alterations in sense of self and lifeworld, representing a fundamental self-disturbance in existential feeling.
Schizophrenia bulletin
January 16, 2026
Neil Thomas, Thomas Ward, Eleanor Longden et al.
A new group of psychological interventions for hearing voices, called relational therapies, focuses on changing how a person relates to their voices. These therapies include Relating Therapy, Talking with Voices, and AVATAR Therapy. They use experiential dialogue with voices, such as role-play, direct conversation, or computer avatars, to improve the hearer-voice relationship. AVATAR Therapy has shown effectiveness in multiple randomized trials, Relating Therapy in two trials, and a trial for Talking with Voices is ongoing. Key mechanisms involve changing how the hearer relates to the voice, reducing threat, and integrating the voice experience into the person's life story. Future research should explore which therapy works for whom and how these therapies affect voice hearing itself.
Schizophrenia bulletin
March 22, 2023
Eric J Tan, Iris E C Sommer, Lena Palaniyappan
This special issue examines the role of language in psychosis, exploring the connections between formal thought disorder and conceptual disorganization, along with speech and language markers and their neural underpinnings. It also discusses the use of computational methods to analyze language in psychosis and the potential of speech and language data for digital phenotyping in psychiatry.