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Despite the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, on the one hand, contemporary organicistic psychiatry often highlights abnormalities in neurotransmitter systems like dysregulation of dopamine transmission, neural circuitry, and genetic factors as key contributors to schizophrenia. Neuroscience, on the other, has so far almost entirely neglected the first-person experiential dimension of this syndrome, mainly focusing on high-order cognitive functions, such as executive function, working memory, theory of mind, and the like. An alternative view posits that schizophrenia is a self-disorder characterized by anomalous self-experience and awareness. This view may not only shed new light on the psychopathological features of psychosis but also inspire empirical research targeting the bodily and neurobiological changes underpinning this disorder. Cognitive neuroscience can today address classic topics of phenomenological psychopathology by adding a new level of description, finally enabling the correlation between the first-person experiential aspects of psychiatric diseases and their neurobiological roots. Recent empirical evidence on the neurobiological basis of a minimal notion of the self, the bodily self, is presented. The relationship between the body, its motor potentialities and the notion of minimal self is illustrated. Evidence on the neural mechanisms underpinning the bodily self, its plasticity, and the blurring of self-other distinction in schizophrenic patients is introduced and discussed. It is concluded that brain-body function anomalies of multisensory integration, differential processing of self- and other-related bodily information mediating self-experience, might be at the basis of the disruption of the self disorders characterizing schizophrenia., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Self-alienation is a common characterization of various disturbing experiences in patients with schizophrenia. A vivid example comes from patient reports of not recognizing themselves when inspecting their specular image in the mirror. By applying the multisensory paradigm of the Enfacement Illusion, this study empirically addresses the specular Self-Other discrimination in patients with schizophrenia. 35 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and 35 healthy matched controls were enrolled in the study. Results found that the group of patients with schizophrenia had a significant skewed self-other discrimination towards the other at baseline. Furthermore, the effect of visuo-tactile stimulation on self-recognition in the schizophrenia patients was significantly altered after both synchronous and asynchronous stimulation compared to baseline. This contrasted with healthy controls which in line with earlier studies only had significantly different self-recognition after synchronous stimulation. The study thus suggests that patients with schizophrenia have deviations in their specular self-recognition compared to healthy controls. Moreover, that temporal factors in multisensory integration may contribute to alterations of self-related stimuli in patients with schizophrenia., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None of the authors have any conflict of interest to declare., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Schizophrenia has been described as a self-disorder, whereas social deficits are key features of the illness. Changes in "resting state" activity of brain networks involved in self-related processing have been consistently reported in schizophrenia, but their meaning for social perception deficits remains poorly understood. Here, we applied a novel approach investigating the relationship between task-evoked neural activity during social perception and functional organization of self-related brain networks during a "resting state". "Resting state" functional MRI was combined with task-related functional MRI using a social perception experiment. Twenty-one healthy control participants (HC) and 21 out-patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (SCH) were included. There were no significant differences concerning age, IQ, education and gender between the groups. Results showed reduced "resting state" functional connectivity between ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dorsal posterior cingulate cortex in SCH, compared to HC. During social perception, neural activity in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex and behavioral data indicated impaired congruence coding of social stimuli in SCH. Task-evoked activity during social perception in dorsal posterior cingulate cortex co-varied with dorsal posterior cingulate cortex-ventromedial prefrontal cortex functional connectivity during a "resting state" in HC, but not in SCH. Task-evoked activity also correlated with negative symptoms in SCH. These preliminary findings, showing disrupted prediction of social perception measures by "resting state" functioning of self-related brain networks in schizophrenia, provide important insight in the hypothesized link between self and social deficits. They also shed light on the meaning of "resting state" changes for tasks such as social perception., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Anomalous experiences such as Basic Symptoms (BS) are considered the first subjective manifestation of the neurobiological substrate of schizophrenia. The purpose of this study was to explore whether a low or high emotional motor resonance occurring in Schizophrenia Spectrum (SzSp) patients was related to patients׳ clinical features and to their anomalous subjective experiences as indexed by the Bonn Scale for the Assessment of Basic Symptoms (BSABS). To this aim, we employed a validated paradigm sensitive in evoking a congruent facial mimicry (measured by means of facial electromyographic activity, EMG) through multimodal positive and negative emotional stimuli presentation. Results showed that SzSp patients more resonating with negative emotional stimuli (i.e. Externalizers) had significantly higher scores in BSABS Cluster 3 (Vulnerability) and more psychotic episodes than Internalizers patients. On the other hand, SzSp patients more resonating with positive emotional stimuli (i.e. Externalizers) scored higher in BSABS Cluster 5 (Interpersonal irritation) than Internalizers. Drawing upon a phenomenological-based perspective, we attempted to shed new light on the abnormal experiences characterizing schizophrenia, explaining them in terms of a disruption of the normal self-perception conveyed by the basic, low-level emotional motor mechanisms., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Self-disorders (SDs) have been described as a core schizophrenia spectrum vulnerability phenotype, both in classic and contemporary psychopathological literature. However, such a core phenotype has not yet been investigated adopting a trans-domain approach that combines the phenomenological and the neurophysiological levels of analysis. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between SDs and subtle, schizophrenia-specific impairments of emotional resonance that are supposed to reflect abnormalities in the mirror neurons mechanism. Specifically, we tested whether electromyographic response to emotional stimuli (i.e. a proxy for subtle changes in facial mimicry and related motor resonance mechanisms) would predict the occurrence of anomalous subjective experiences (i.e. SDs)., Sampling and Methods: Eighteen schizophrenia spectrum (SzSp) patients underwent a comprehensive psychopathological examination and were contextually tested with a multimodal paradigm, recording facial electromyographic activity of muscles in response to positive and negative emotional stimuli. Experiential anomalies were explored with the Bonn Scale for the Assessment of Basic Symptoms (BSABS) and then condensed into rational subscales mapping SzSp anomalous self-experiences., Results: SzSp patients showed an imbalance in emotional motor resonance with a selective bias toward negative stimuli, as well as a multisensory integration impairment. Multiple regression analysis showed that electromyographic facial reactions in response to negative stimuli presented in auditory modality specifically and strongly correlated with SD subscore., Conclusions: The study confirms the potential of SDs as target phenotype for neurobiological research and encourages research into disturbed motor/emotional resonance as possible body-level correlate of disturbed subjective experiences in SzSp.

Self-experience anomalies are elementary features of schizophrenic pathology. Such deficits can have a profound impact on self-other relationship, but how they are related through aberrant brain function remains poorly understood. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we provide new evidence for a cortical link between aberrant self-experience and social cognition in first-episode schizophrenia (FES). As identified in previous studies, ventral premotor cortex (vPMC) and posterior insula (pIC) are candidate brain regions underlying disturbances in both self-experience and self-other relationship due to their processing of predominantly externally guided (vPMC; goal-oriented behavior) and internally guided (pIC; interoception) stimuli. Results from functional interaction analysis in a sample of 24 FES patients and 22 healthy controls show aberrant functional interactions (background/intrinsic connectivity) of right vPMC and bilateral pIC with posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a midline region that has been shown central in mediating self-experience. More specifically, our results show increased functional coupling between vPMC and PCC, which positively correlated with basic symptoms (subjective self-experience disturbances). pIC showed reduced functional coupling with PCC and postcentral gyrus and increased functional interactions with anterior insula. Taken together, our results suggest an imbalance in the processing between internally and externally guided information and its abnormal integration with self-referential processing as mediated by PCC. Due to our correlation findings, we suggest this imbalance to be closely related to basic symptoms in FES and thus anomalous self-experience. The findings further disentangle the cortical basis of how self-experience anomalies may pervade the social domain., (© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Schizophrenic patients may report unusual perception of their own body. Studies using the rubber hand illusion (RHI) proposed that they exhibit a distorted sense of body ownership. However, since the RHI is mostly achieved with the contribution of visuo-tactile integration, the stronger RHI observed in schizophrenic patients could reflect either a general increase of the response to multisensory stimuli or a larger influence of visual cues on the tactile sensory experience. The purpose of the present study is to investigate patients' perception of their own body by means of a behavioral paradigm that measures their proneness to the RHI without relying on multisensory integration occurring during actual experience of touch. In a previous study we demonstrated in healthy participants that expectation of touch experience arising at the sight of a human hand approaching a rubber hand is enough to induce a sense of ownership over the same hand. Here we take advantage of the same paradigm to investigate body ownership in schizophrenia. Patients observed the experimenter's hand while approaching--without touching--either a rubber hand or a piece of wood placed in front of them. The seen object could be either aligned to participant's hand or rotated by 180°. Phenomenology of the illusion revealed that schizophrenic patients exhibited sense of ownership over the rubber hand, but more weakly than healthy controls. The present study sheds new light on the experience of body ownership in schizophrenic patients, corroborating the notion that alterations of bodily self-awareness play an important role in schizophrenia., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background/aims: Several components of social cognition are compromised in schizophrenia (SCZ) from the early stage of the illness. In this study we first investigated whether mirror neuron-driven embodied simulation (mnES) is altered in first-episode SCZ. Second, we tested whether emotional cues impact on the mnES in SCZ patients., Methods: Twenty-two SCZ patients and 22 healthy controls (HCs) observed goal-related actions in either a neutral or emotional context during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning., Results: Observation of neutral action elicited a lower activity in the frontoparietal network in SCZ patients, as compared to HCs. Particularly, activation in the left inferior parietal lobule in response to the same condition negatively correlated with patients' self-experience disturbances. Moreover, observation of an action performed by an angry agent produced poorer neural activity in the right anterior insula in SCZ patients as compared to HCs. This difference was mostly due to the negative β-values shown by SCZ patients, which positively correlated with their empathy scores. No differences were found contingent upon the observation of an action performed by a happy agent., Conclusion: Our results show that emotional cues allow SCZ patients to partially recover mnES. However, their understanding of the emotional components of the actions of others will likely remain deficient., (© 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

Social dysfunction has been recognized as an elementary feature of schizophrenia, but it remains a crucial issue whether social deficits in schizophrenia concern the inter-subjective domain or primarily have their roots in disturbances of self-experience. Social perception comprises vicarious processes grounding an experiential inter-relationship with others as well as self-regulation processes allowing to maintain a coherent sense of self. The present study investigated whether the functional neural basis underlying these processes is altered in first-episode schizophrenia (FES). Twenty-four FES patients and 22 healthy control participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during a social perception task requiring them to watch videos depicting other individuals' inanimate and animate/social tactile stimulations, and a tactile localizer condition. Activation in ventral premotor cortex for observed bodily tactile stimulations was reduced in the FES group and negatively correlated with self-experience disturbances. Moreover, FES patients showed aberrant differential activation in posterior insula for first-person tactile experiences and observed affective tactile stimulations. These findings suggest that social perception in FES at a pre-reflective level is characterized by disturbances of self-experience, including impaired multisensory representations and self-other distinction. However, the results also show that social perception in FES involves more complex alterations of neural activation at multiple processing levels.

Karl Jaspers laid the foundations of contemporary psychopathology. Among Jaspers' contributions was his powerful vision of psychiatry as a crucial way to shed light on the human condition and existence by integrating the scientific study of psychic diseases with a theoretical approach focused on human experience. This perspective should be revitalized. In the present paper we start from the role Jaspers assigns to the body when discussing the notion of 'personalization'. We explore the relationship between a minimal notion of the self, the 'bodily self', and its potentiality for movement - the self's 'power for action'. Based on recent empirical evidence, we then propose a connection between the implicit bodily self-experience and important psychopathological aspects of schizophrenia by showing that schizophrenic patients exhibit a disruption of implicit bodily self-knowledge. We propose that the bodily nature of the implicitly experiencing self might enable the continuum of experience along which all visions of the world are located - both in healthy and psychotic individuals. The power for action might provide the possibility to give form to the bodily presence characterizing in the first place our being selves., (© 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

Schizophrenia is often associated with deficits in the domain of language, which are thought to be closely related to deficits in the structure of semantic knowledge. The main aim of the present study was to behaviorally investigate whether semantic impairments in schizophrenia are present also at the very basic level of action verb processing, in particular at the level of motor simulation. We used a go-no go paradigm both for a semantic decision task (with either an early, EGD, or a delayed go-signal delivery, DGD) and for a lexical decision task (control task). Only the first task requires motor simulation to be solved. We found that first-episode schizophrenia (FES) patients, like healthy control (HC) participants, use motor simulation as a basic strategy to semantically judge action verbs. In the EGD condition, both motor simulation and action verb understanding seem to be preserved in FES. However, differently from HC participants, FES patients kept on using the simulation strategy also with the DGD condition, whereas, simultaneously, task performance during this condition appeared to be less efficient and sensitive. Voxel-based morphometry analysis suggested that this altered performance in FES patients could be related to structural brain abnormalities in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We propose that a prolonged motor simulation in FES may serve as a compensatory strategy for impairments in the selection of action representation and/or for memory deficits disclosed by the DGD condition during the semantic decision task investigated in the present study., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Sense of agency (SoA) indicates a person's ability to perceive her/his own motor acts as actually being her/his and, through them, to exert control over the course of external events. Disruptions in SoA may profoundly affect the individual's functioning, as observed in several neuropsychiatric disorders. This is the first article to systematically review studies that investigated intentional binding (IB), a quantitative proxy for SoA measurement, in neurological and psychiatric patients. Eligible were studies of IB involving patients with neurological and/or psychiatric disorders. We included 15 studies involving 692 individuals. Risk of bias was low throughout studies. Abnormally increased action‐outcome binding was found in schizophrenia and in patients with Parkinson's disease taking dopaminergic medications or reporting impulsive‐compulsive behaviors. A decreased IB effect was observed in Tourette's disorder and functional movement disorders, whereas increased action‐outcome binding was found in patients with the cortico‐basal syndrome. The extent of IB deviation from healthy control values correlated with the severity of symptoms in several disorders. Inconsistent effects were found for autism spectrum disorders, anorexia nervosa, and borderline personality disorder. Findings pave the way for treatments specifically targeting SoA in neuropsychiatric disorders where IB is altered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Hypothesis A primary disruption of the bodily self is considered a core feature of schizophrenia (SCZ). The "disembodied" self might be underpinned by inefficient body-related multisensory integration processes, normally occurring in the peripersonal space (PPS), a plastic sector of space surrounding the body whose extent is altered in SCZ. Although PPS is a malleable interface marking the perceptual border between self and others, no study has addressed the potential alteration of its plasticity in SCZ. We investigated the plasticity of PPS in SCZ patients after a motor training with a tool in the far space. Study Design Twenty-seven SCZ patients and 32 healthy controls (HC) underwent an audio-tactile task to estimate PPS boundary before (Session 1) and after (Session 3) the tool-use. Parameters of PPS, including the size and the slope of the psychometric function describing audio-tactile RTs as a function of the audio-tactile distances, were estimated. Study Results Results confirm a narrow PPS extent in SCZ. Surprisingly, we found PPS expansion in both groups, thus showing for the first time a preserved PPS plasticity in SCZ. Patients experienced a weaker differentiation from others, as indicated by a shallower PPS slope at Session 1 that correlated positively with negative symptoms. However, at Session 3, patients marked their bodily boundary in a steeper way, suggesting a sharper demarcation of PPS boundaries after the action with the tool. Conclusions These findings highlight the importance of investigating the multisensory and motor roots of self-disorders, paving the way for future body-centred rehabilitation interventions that could improve patients' altered body boundary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some people diagnosed with "schizophrenia" showed a fundamental alteration of the sense of self. From a psychodynamic perspective, it has been hypothesized that patients diagnosed as schizophrenic have disorders of the embodied self and its boundaries. Phenomenologically, it has been observed a self-disorder, at an implicit and pre-reflective level of bodily awareness. Neuroscientific evidence seems to confirm the aforementioned aspects. The mean levels of Interoceptive Accuracy (IA), which is an objective empirical measure of interoception, namely a measure of basic awareness distinct from subjective measures, are significantly lower in patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia than among healthy controls. Affiliative touch is crucial for constructing a basic sense of self and its boundaries, and it affects interoception. In order to reduce the disturbance of the sense of self, Angelo participated for three years in an experimental intervention plan including Amniotic Therapy (AT) and individual psychodynamic psychotherapy. AT is a group-therapy based on sensory-motor interactions, especially affiliative touch, similar to those involved in "holding". Results showed an increase in the Angelo's IA and global functioning, as well as a significant decrease in positive symptoms. In Angelo, AT seems to strengthen a basic sense of self, reducing self-disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While investigating social cognitive impairments in schizophrenia, prominent evidence has been found that patients with schizophrenia show a tendency to misclassify neutral stimuli as negatively valenced. Within this population, patients presenting delusions are more prone to this phenomenon. In a previous study, Schizophrenia spectrum (SzSp) patients rated positive, negative and neutral stimuli that were multimodally presented, while assessed with a checklist exploring anomalous subjective experiences and evaluated for positive and negative symptomatology. In the present work, we aimed to further explore the relationship between neutral stimuli misperception, anomalous experiences and positive/negative symptoms in SzSp patients. To this end, we adopted a dimensional approach by reconstructing from available data: (1) four a priori scales representing essential dimensions of SzSp experiential pathology following Parnas et al. (2005); and (2) five clinically meaningful factors to describe illness severity derived by Toomey et al. (1997). Results showed that although overall patients correctly recognized the target emotions, those who misinterpreted neutral auditory cues as negatively valenced also presented higher scores in Perplexity (PY), Bizarre Delusions (BD) and Disorganization (Di) dimensions. Moreover, a positive association between BD and both PY and Self-Disorder (SD) dimensions emerged, suggesting that psychotic symptoms may be directly linked to patients' subjectivity. In an attempt to comprehensively capture the multilayered neutral stimuli misperception phenomenon in SzSp, we aimed at bridging phenomenology and neurobiology by connecting the levels of molecular neurochemistry (i.e., altered dopaminergic neurotransmission), system neuroscience (aberrant salience of perceptual details) and psychopathology (the chain involving hyper-reflexivity, self-disorders and the emergence of delusions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study focuses on the multifaceted concept of self-disturbance in schizophrenia, adding knowledge about a not yet investigated aspect, which is the interoceptive accuracy. Starting from the assumption that interoceptive accuracy requires an intact sense of self, which otherwise was proved to be altered in schizophrenia, the aim of the present study was to explore interoceptive accuracy in a group of schizophrenia patients, compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, the possible association between interoceptive accuracy and patients' positive and negative symptomatology was assessed. To pursue these goals, a group of 23 schizophrenia patients and a group of 23 healthy controls performed a heartbeat perception task. Patients' symptomatology was assessed by means of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Results demonstrated significantly lower interoceptive accuracy in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy controls. This difference was not accounted for participants' age, BMI, anxiety levels, and heart rate. Furthermore, patients' illness severity, attention and pharmacological treatment did not influence their interoceptive accuracy levels. Interestingly, a strong positive relation between interoceptive accuracy and positive symptoms severity, especially Grandiosity, was found. The present results demonstrate for the first time that interoceptive accuracy is altered in schizophrenia. Furthermore, they prove a specific association between interoceptive accuracy and positive symptomatology, suggesting that the symptom Grandiosity might be protective against an altered basic sense of self in patients characterized by higher sensibility to their inner bodily sensations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By empirically investigating the neural correlates of the basic experience one makes of oneself as bodily self and of its alterations, new light can be shed on the relationship between self-disturbances and social deficits in schizophrenia. We review recent neuroscientific evidence showing how a pre-reflective, experiential understanding of others can be accomplished, so that others are conceived as bodily selves by means of neural reuse of our own sensorimotor and visceromotor resources, and how a clear distinction between self and other is normally preserved. By conjugating identity and alterity, a putative neural mechanism is provided underpinning the blurring of such distinction in schizophrenic patients. The reviewed empirical data suggest brain function anomalies at the levels of multisensory integration, differential processing of self- and other-related bodily information, and mediating self-experience at the basis of an imbalance in the pre-reflective relationship of the embodied self to the world including the social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we review the recent empirical evidence on the neurobiological basis of a minimal notion of the self, the bodily self. We show the relationship between the body, its motor potentialities and the notion of minimal self. We argue that this approach can shed new light onto self-disturbances and social deficits characterizing schizophrenia. We discuss our approach with other views on the neural correlates of self-disturbances in schizophrenia and propose that cognitive neuroscience can today address the classical topics of psychopathology by adding a new level of description, finally enabling the correlation between the first-person experiential aspects of psychiatric diseases and their neurobiological roots. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional facial expression is an important low-level mechanism contributing to the experience of empathy, thereby lying at the core of social interaction. Schizophrenia is associated with pervasive social cognitive impairments, including emotional processing of facial expressions. In this study we test a novel paradigm in order to investigate the evaluation of the emotional content of perceived emotions presented through dynamic expressive stimuli, facial mimicry evoked by the same stimuli, and their functional relation. Fifteen healthy controls and 15 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia were presented with stimuli portraying positive (laugh), negative (cry) and neutral (control) emotional stimuli in visual, auditory modalities in isolation, and congruently or incongruently associated. Participants where requested to recognize and quantitatively rate the emotional value of the perceived stimuli, while electromyographic activity of Corrugator and Zygomaticus muscles was recorded. All participants correctly judged the perceived emotional stimuli and prioritized the visual over the auditory modality in identifying the emotion when they were incongruently associated (Audio-Visual Incongruent condition). The neutral emotional stimuli did not evoke any muscle responses and were judged by all participants as emotionally neutral. Control group responded with rapid and congruent mimicry to emotional stimuli, and in Incongruent condition muscle responses were driven by what participants saw rather than by what they heard. Patient group showed a similar pattern only with respect to negative stimuli, whereas showed a lack of or a non-specific Zygomaticus response when positive stimuli were presented. Finally, we found that only patients with reduced facial mimicry (Internalizers) judged both positive and negative emotions as significantly more neutral than controls. The relevance of these findings for studying emotional deficits in schizophrenia is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Introduction Materials and Methods Results Conclusions Individuals with schizophrenia present anomalies in the extension and plasticity of the peripersonal space (PPS), the section of space surrounding the body, shaped through motor experiences. A weak multisensory integration in PPS would contribute to an impairment of self‐embodiment processing, a core feature of the disorder linked to specific subjective experiences.In this exploratory study, we aimed at: (1) testing an association between PPS features, psychopathology, and subjective experiences in schizophrenia; (2) describing the PPS profile in individuals with early‐onset schizophrenia.Twenty‐seven individuals with schizophrenia underwent a task measuring the PPS size and boundaries demarcation before and after a motor training with a tool. The Positive And Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), the Examination of Anomalous Self Experience scale (EASE) and the Autism Rating Scale (ARS) were used to assess psychopathology. Subsequently, participants were divided into two subgroups, early and adult‐onset schizophrenia. The two groups were compared in regard to their PPS and psychopathological profiles.PPS patterns were associated with psychopathology, particularly positively with PANSS negative scale score, and negatively with subjective experiences of existential reorientation (EASE Domain 5 scores) and of social encounters (ARS scores). Only PPS parameters and ARS scores differentiated between early and adult‐onset participants.Our results, although preliminary and exploratory, can suggest a link between PPS patterns, negative symptoms, and disturbances of the subjective experience, particularly in the intersubjective domain, in schizophrenia. Moreover, they seem to suggest that specific PPS profiles and schizophrenic autism traits could be markers of early‐onset schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Schizophrenia spectrum has been associated with a disruption of the basic sense of self, which pertains, among others, the representation of one’s own body. We investigated the impact of either implicit or explicit access to the representation of one’s own body-effectors on bodily self-awareness, in first-episode schizophrenia (FES) patients and healthy controls (HCs). We contrasted their performance in an implicit self-recognition task (visual matching) and in an explicit self/other discrimination task. Both tasks employed participant’s own and others’ body-effectors. Concerning the implicit task, HCs were more accurate with their own than with others’ body-effectors, whereas patients did not show such self-advantage. Regarding the explicit task, both groups did not exhibit a self-advantage, and patients showed a higher percentage of self-misattribution errors. Neither self/other nor implicit/explicit effects were found in both groups when processing inanimate-objects. We propose that FES patients suffer of a disturbed implicit sense of bodily self. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]