Out of touch with reality? Social perception in first-episode schizophrenia

• DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss012
• Publication Date: 2012-01-25T03:04:39Z
• Authors: Sjoerd J. H. Ebisch; Anatolia Salone; Francesca Ferri; Domenico De Berardis; Gian Luca Romani; Filippo M. Ferro; Vittorio Gallese
• Keywords: Adult; Cerebral Cortex; Male; 610; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Young Adult; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Social Perception; Touch Perception; Touch; Disturbances of self-experience; Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); Multisensoryintegration; Psychosis; Self-other distinction; 616; Schizophrenia; Visual Perception; Humans; Female

Social dysfunction has been recognized as an elementary feature of schizophrenia, but it remains a crucial issue whether social deficits in schizophrenia concern the inter-subjective domain or primarily have their roots in disturbances of self-experience. Social perception comprises vicarious processes grounding an experiential inter-relationship with others as well as self-regulation processes allowing to maintain a coherent sense of self. The present study investigated whether the functional neural basis underlying these processes is altered in first-episode schizophrenia (FES). Twenty-four FES patients and 22 healthy control participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during a social perception task requiring them to watch videos depicting other individuals' inanimate and animate/social tactile stimulations, and a tactile localizer condition. Activation in ventral premotor cortex for observed bodily tactile stimulations was reduced in the FES group and negatively correlated with self-experience disturbances. Moreover, FES patients showed aberrant differential activation in posterior insula for first-person tactile experiences and observed affective tactile stimulations. These findings suggest that social perception in FES at a pre-reflective level is characterized by disturbances of self-experience, including impaired multisensory representations and self-other distinction. However, the results also show that social perception in FES involves more complex alterations of neural activation at multiple processing levels.