Self-Monitoring in Schizophrenia

Abstract

Many patients suffering from schizophrenia feel dispossessed from some of their actions or thoughts. This dispossession could result from impaired self-monitoring (SM), defined as the ability to monitor self-willed intentions and actions. SM has been widely studied during the past decades with very different paradigms; central error correction, feedback distortion, sense of effort, and motor imagery. The present article first reviews the methods used and results obtained in investigation of SM. Second, we address what we consider to be the critical questions that must be answered in order to fully understand the role of SM deficit in schizophrenia: 1) Is SM deficit only impaired in patients with specific symptoms? 2) Is SM deficit associated with other cognitive processes that are also impaired in patients with schizophrenia? 3) Can SM impairment be characterized as a trait or a state marker? Finally, we discuss the consequences of SM investigation on diagnostic evaluation and therapeutic orientations and we propose future research that we think is essential in order to clarify the role of SM in schizophrenia.

Through the looking glass: Self and others

“…On the basis of this kind of experiments as well as of a set of studies on action misattribution in schizophrenic patients (Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2002;Fourneret et al, 2002;Franck et al, 2001; see also Farrer and Franck (2007) for a review), it has been proposed that the self/other distinction could depend on a mechanism (who-mechanism) discriminating action representations endogenously generated from those externally evoked (Georgieff & Jeannerod, 1998;Jeannerod, 2003). Although the locution ''who-mechanism'' (or even ''who-system'') might give rise to some misunderstanding, suggesting the notion of putative brain centers univocally devoted to process self-or other-related information, the above reviewed findings clearly corroborate the critical role of the cortical motor system in encoding both our sense of self and our sense of others, at least at a basic level.…”

Recognition of Self-Generated Facial Emotions Is Impaired in Schizophrenia

“…Such an unawareness of impairment has also been reported in several domains, for example, in assessment of their cognitive impairment level, 19 functional disabilities, 20 and decision-making skills. 21 This lack of awareness, that could hypothetically be caused by impaired self-monitoring, 22 may then be a core aspect of schizophrenia.…”

A Human-Like Agent Model for Attribution of Actions Using Ownership States and Inverse Mirroring

“…[14], [15], [17], [20]. Persons suffering from Schizophrenia, for example, not only fail to attribute self-generated actions to themselves, but they also attribute them to other agents (which can be real or imaginary); e.g., [6,8,9,10,21,24].…”