Misattributing the Source of Self-Generated Representations Related to Dissociative and Psychotic Symptoms

Abstract

Objective: An intertwined relationship has been found between dissociative and psychotic symptoms, as the two symptom clusters frequently co-occur, suggesting some shared risk factors. Using a source monitoring paradigm, previous studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia made more errors in source monitoring, suggesting that a weakened sense of individuality may be associated with psychotic symptoms. However, no studies have verified a relationship between sense of individuality and dissociation, and it is unclear whether an altered sense of individuality is a shared sociocognitive deficit underlying both dissociation and psychosis.Method: Data from 80 acute psychiatric patients with unspecified mental disorders were analyzed to test the hypothesis that an altered sense of individuality underlies dissociation and psychosis. Behavioral tasks, including tests of intelligence and source monitoring, as well as interview schedules and self-report measures of dissociative and psychotic symptoms, general psychopathology, and trauma history, were administered.Results: Significant correlations of medium effect sizes indicated an association between errors attributing the source of self-generated items and positive psychotic symptoms and the absorption and amnesia measures of dissociation. The associations with dissociative measures remained significant after the effects of intelligence, general psychopathology, and trauma history were excluded. Moreover, the relationships between source misattribution and dissociative measures remained marginally significant and significant after controlling for positive and negative psychotic symptoms, respectively.Limitations: Self-reported measures were collected from a small sample, and most of the participants were receiving medications when tested, which may have influenced their cognitive performance.Conclusions: A tendency to misidentify the source of self-generated items characterized both dissociation and psychosis. An altered sense of individuality embedded in self-referential representations appears to be a common sociocognitive deficit of dissociation and psychosis.

Impaired Self-Monitoring of Inner Speech in Schizophrenia Patients with Verbal Hallucinations and in Non-clinical Individuals Prone to Hallucinations

“…Social anhedonia might be more specifically involved in this relationship than is negative schizotypy. Our data suggest that the opposite association of positive and negative symptoms with memory errors, reported in this patient sample and a few others ( Stirling et al, 2001 ; Brébion et al, 2002 , 2012 ; Chiu et al, 2016 ), may also be obtained in healthy participants. Further, this might not be restricted to memory errors since atypicality of produced exemplars was found to be increased along thought disorganization and decreased along certain negative symptoms in both a schizophrenia ( Brébion et al, 2013a ) and a schizotypy ( Minor et al, 2011 ) sample.…”

“… Stirling et al (2001) used a self-monitoring task involving the recognition of one’s own drawings among others and reported that, while positive symptoms were associated with more errors, negative symptoms were associated with fewer. Very recently, a self-monitoring study conducted in an acute psychiatric sample revealed that positive symptoms were associated with tendency to misattribute self-produced verbal items to the experimenter, while negative symptoms were associated with tendency to misattribute to oneself the items produced by the experimenter ( Chiu et al, 2016 ). In non-clinical populations no association between negative schizotypy and decreased rates of memory errors has yet been reported, as far as we know.…”

Feeling Empathically Toward Other People and the Self: The Role of Perspective Shifting in Emotion Sharing and Self-Reassurance

“…Three indices could be extracted, with two of them corresponding to updating (equality of response usage) and inhibition (prepotent associates), respectively (Miyake et al, 2000). Through exploratory factor analysis, a three-factor solution comparable with that of previous studies was found in the current sample (Chiu, Tseng, et al, 2016; Friedman & Miyake, 2004; Miyake et al, 2000; Towse & Mclachlan, 1999; Towse & Neil, 1998). The indicators were standardized and averaged to form the indices of updating (RNG score, turning-point index, runs, and adjacency) and inhibition (R, coupon, mean of repetition gap, and median of repetition gap).…”

Childhood trauma and cognitive biases associated with psychosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…We included 26 studies [ 21 , 35 – 59 ] that fulfilled all search criteria (see Table 1 for summary of studies). The studies were based in the following countries: USA (12 studies) [ 21 , 35 , 38 , 41 , 43 , 48 , 50 – 55 ], UK (3 studies) [ 39 , 44 , 46 ], Australia (2 studies) [ 40 , 49 ], and 1 each in Canada [ 47 ], China [ 59 ], Greece [ 36 ], Holland [ 45 ], Italy [ 56 ], Japan [ 58 ], New Zealand [ 57 ], Turkey [ 37 ] and Taiwan [ 42 ]. Six studies [ 38 , 40 , 48 , 51 , 52 , 56 ] recruited separate exposed and unexposed samples and the remaining studies were cross-sectional designs.…”