Minimal self-disturbance—a fragility in the implicit sense of self, presence, and agency—is a core feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In a test of a neurophenomenological model, source monitoring deficits explained 39.8% of the variance in minimal self-disturbance scores across 50 ultra-high risk patients, 39 first-episode psychosis patients, and 34 healthy controls. Aberrant salience explained only 6% of the variance and was more related to positive psychotic symptoms than to self-disturbance. The model may need to incorporate additional constructs like temporal processing and multisensory integration. Longitudinal analyses will follow.
Anxiety is reported as the basic emotion that buffers, transforms, and sometimes supplants all others in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Emotions are experienced as foreign, unstable, and perturbing, contributing to feelings of ambivalence, perplexity, and an unstable sense of self. These emotion experiences may underlie a wide range of psychopathological phenomena in cognitive and social functioning. The results, based on interviews with 20 participants at admission and six months later, may not be generalizable to all schizophrenia patients due to the small sample size and selection from psychotherapeutic units.