The impressionable social self of schizophrenia: Neural correlates of self-other confusion after social interaction

Abstract

Background: Social interactions require rapid, real-time information integration and performative application of dynamic social information, and can be especially difficult for patients with schizophrenia. Their difficulty processing social information could lie in challenges extracting the information or in updating their actions to accommodate the new information, resulting in behaviors that may appear rigid or inappropriate. Disruptions may emerge in the underlying, requisite behavioral or neural processes. Methods: Seventeen matched healthy controls and seventeen patients with schizophrenia participated in an fMRI study, which included a social interaction priming procedure wherein they met a friendly stranger who held opposite social values from their own. They answered self-judgement questions about their social values two days before the priming experiment and again during the fMRI scan. Results: Controls suppress social values when interacting with the stranger whereas patients with schizophrenia augment the opposite values, simultaneously holding two sets of social values. Compared to controls, patients display hyperactivity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and atypical activity in caudate, posterior cingulate and precuneus. Discussion: Patients appear to correctly extract social information but apply the information atypically. They display evidence of atypical social flexibility on both performative and neural measures, resulting in confusion between self and other.

Transient brain networks underlying interpersonal strategies during synchronized action

“…This relationship is reversed in leading–leading, as illustrated in Figure 4 . The precuneus has been proposed to serve an integrator of external and self-generated information, with fMRI studies showing increased activity when we consider a perceived action as linked to another agent ( Farrer and Frith, 2002 ; Cavanna and Trimble, 2006 ; Chaminade et al., 2012 ; Fairhurst et al., 2014 ; Crafa et al., 2020 ). While EEG-based connectivity measures cannot be directly linked to activity-based measures such as the BOLD response used in fMRI, it is nonetheless highly intriguing that the precuneus substantially changes its information flow between the two synchronization strategies.…”

Prefrontal contributions to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience

“…Hyperactivation of the dMPFC is associated with schizophrenic individuals' propensity to endorse social values they had previously reported not to hold, following their exposure to individuals who acted as if they did hold them [271]. This suggests that for schizophrenic individuals, hyperactivity in the dMPFC may underlie an attenuated self-other boundary by introducing abstract information about social others (such as their values) into judgements about oneself.…”

“…In other instances of social cognition, however, the automatic constraints afforded by the dMPFC may contribute to increased variability in thought and conscious experience, such as in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a clinical condition associated with altered dMPFC neural activity [270][271][272][273][274], morphology [273,275], and metabolism [276], that has been argued to feature a significantly increased variability of thought and conscious experience: common positive symptoms include hyper-associative thinking, auditory hallucination, and an attenuated self-other boundary [94,95]. An attenuated self-other boundary refers to a diminished distinction between information related to oneself and others-a phenomenon that is specifically linked to altered activation of the dMPFC [271].…”