Abnormal agency experiences in schizophrenia patients: Examining the role of psychotic symptoms and familial risk

Disrupted Sense of Agency as a State Marker of First-Episode Schizophrenia: A Large-Scale Follow-Up Study

“…We used continuous-report selfattribution (SoA) and sensorimotor control (Color) tasks, and, in patients, PANSS to assess clinical symptoms. The results of our study are consistent with the previous reports on the impaired self-attribution of agency in schizophrenia patients (8,25,26,41). In line with previous findings (42,43), patients also showed an impairment in a broader cognitive/sensorimotor domain reflected in the Color task performance.…”

“…The majority of findings generally pinpoint the significant role of positive symptoms in alterations of SoA, which is, in most cases, linked with exaggerated self-agency [i.e., attribution of causation of events to self; (8,11,24)], although diminished self-agency has also been documented (23,25). While finding alterations of SoA in schizophrenia patients compared to controls, no significant correlations have been found between performance in SoA tasks based on explicit judgments of agency and either PANSS total or subscale scores (26), or passivity symptoms (25). A significant limitation of the reviewed studies is small sample sizes of the target patient groups.…”

“…Regarding the discussion about state vs. trait nature of selfdisturbances in schizophrenia (i.e., present only in acute phases, or not), phenomenologically oriented studies support the traitlike character of SDs (3,6,27,28). In behavioral studies, evidence can be found for both sides; there are findings of alteration of self-monitoring as a trait (10,25,26), state (29), or intermediatemarker (30,31).…”

Impaired self-agency inferences in schizophrenia: The role of cognitive capacity and causal reasoning style

“…Specifically, by employing a reliable and widely used agency task allowing to examine goal-based and prime-based agency inferences, patients (in contrast to healthy controls) showed less (or even no) enhanced experiences of self-agency over action-outcomes that match primed outcome information. The impaired prime-based agency inferences in patients could not be explained by motivational problems to conduct the task [17], problems in visual processing of primed information [18], or symptom severity [19]. Consequently, the question remains: what then causes these impaired inferences of self-agency that are thought to be involved in social interaction?…”

“…Together, this illustrates that feelings of authorship in social situations can be affected unconsciously. Interestingly, patients with schizophrenia show specific impairments in agency inferences of behavior that is not explicitly instigated by goal-directed thought [17][18][19]. Specifically, by employing a reliable and widely used agency task allowing to examine goal-based and prime-based agency inferences, patients (in contrast to healthy controls) showed less (or even no) enhanced experiences of self-agency over action-outcomes that match primed outcome information.…”