Abstract
The self-disturbances (SDs) concept is considered to be part of the Schneider's first rank schizophrenia symptoms, i.e., thought-withdrawal, thought-insertion, thought-broadcasting, somatic-passivity experiences, mental/motor automatisms, disrupted unitary self-experience (Mishara et al., 2014). SDs were originally described by W.
Mayer-Gross (1920), who observed them in psychotic patients. We classified Mayer-Gross' findings on SDs into the following categories: experience is new/compelling (aberrant salience), reduced access/importance of autobiographical past, cognitions/emotions occur independently from self's volition, foreign agents have power over self and developed an SDs scale based on these categories and cognitive domains (perception, motor, speech, thinking etc.).
Scale is applied as a measure of the frequency of the experiences. We further compared results to occurrence and severity of hallucinations, which were measured with the Questionnaire for Psychotic Experiences (Rossell et all, 2019).
The Questionnaire covers a range of questions that comprehensively characterize different types of hallucinations (including auditory hallucinations) and delusions. In our current study on phenomenology and neurobiology of psychotic symptoms, we administered the scale and the QPE to a study group of patients with schizophrenia (N=133) and healthy volunteers (N=182).
We found substantial differences in the frequency of self-disturbances in patients with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls. In both Cognitive and Mayer-Gross domains, the between-group differences were obtained in all scale items, except for the perception of smells and body experience.
Comparison of SD and hallucinations shows positive correlation between severity of auditory hallucinations and overall SD score. Results also show that the severity of hallucinations correlates positively with cognitive SD domains as well as with domains according to Mayer-Gross.
Additional quantitative analysis is planned to discern more details to phenotype SDs and their relationship to hallucinations in schizophrenia. Supported By: MH CR AZV 17-32957A and MEYS NPU4-NUDZ: LO1611.