Behavioral evidence of impaired self-referential processing in patients with affective disorders and first-episode schizophrenia

Autor: Yanli Zhao, Jiahua Xu, Jiangyue Hong, Xuejing Xu, Hongzhen Fan, Jinguo Zhang, Dong Li, Jingxu Chen, Yaxue Wu, Yanli Li, Yunlong Tan, Shuping Tan
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Scientific Reports, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 1-10 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2045-2322
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-60498-5
Popis: Abstract Despite the critical role of self-disturbance in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, its diverse behavioral manifestations remain poorly understood. This investigation aimed to elucidate unique patterns of self-referential processing in affective disorders and first-episode schizophrenia. A total of 156 participants (41 first-episode schizophrenia [SZ], 33 bipolar disorder [BD], 44 major depressive disorder [MDD], and 38 healthy controls [HC]) engaged in a self-referential effect (SRE) task, assessing trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness, applicability to mother, or others, followed by an unexpected recognition test. All groups displayed preferential self- and mother-referential processing with no significant differences in recognition scores. However, MDD patients showed significantly enhanced self-referential recognition scores and increased bias compared to HC, first-episode SZ, and BD. The present study provides empirical evidence for increased self-focus in MDD and demonstrates that first-episode SZ and BD patients maintain intact self-referential processing abilities. These findings refine our understanding of self-referential processing impairments across psychiatric conditions, suggesting that it could serve as a supplementary measure for assessing treatment response in first-episode SZ and potentially function as a discriminative diagnostic criterion between MDD and BD.
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