title: Out of touch with reality? Social perception in first-episode schizophrenia.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, Department of Neuroscience and Imaging, G d'Annunzio University, Via dei Vestini 33, 66013 Chieti, CH, Italy. sjoerdebisch@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Sjoerd J H
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Ebisch
authors.forename: Anatolia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Salone
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ferri
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: De Berardis
authors.forename: Gian Luca
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Romani
authors.forename: Filippo M
authors.initials: FM
authors.lastname: Ferro
authors.forename: Vittorio
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Gallese
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology / Q000503:physiopathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012938:Social Perception; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D055698:Touch Perception; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult