The Bodily Self and The Role of its Disruption in Schizophrenia

The first aim of my thesis was to shed new light on the contribution of the motor experience of one’s own body to our ability to implicitly differentiate between self and other. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies on healthy participants showed that i) a motor experience-based representation of the bodily self is encased within the sensorimotor system; ii) the necessary condition for this the sensorimotor representation of oneself, as bodily self, to emerge is that it is implicitly rather than explicitly accessed. The second aim of my thesis was to test whether disturbances of the basic sense of self in schizophrenia concern alterations of the implicit and pre-reflective representation of oneself, as bodily self. We found that that schizophrenic patients did not show the self-advantage effect described in healthy people. Indeed, when submitted to a visual matching task, they did not perform better with one’s own rather than others’ body stimuli. The third aim of my thesis was to investigate whether and to what extent social deficits in schizophrenia are primarily due to disturbances of bodily self-experience or rather are mostly determined by a primary deficit of the intersubjective domain. Schizophrenic patients showed aberrant neural processes underlying multisensory integration and differentiation between self and others’ bodily experiences, rather than altered vicarious neural activations during social perception. Our results suggest that disturbances of bodily self-experience may have a primary role in schizophrenia and that they may – at least partly– account for social deficits in schizophrenic patients.