Background: Impaired self-awareness has often been described in schizophrenia. Recent neuroimaging studies examining the self-reflection processes in schizophrenia have produced inconsistent results.
Method: We examined the self-reflective neural network using self- and other-evaluation tasks in schizophrenia. Fifteen schizophrenia patients and fifteen age- and sex-matched healthy subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects were required to decide whether the sentence described their own personal trait (self-evaluation) and that of their close friends (other-evaluation).
Results: Unlike normal control subjects, the schizophrenia patients did not have greater activation of the left posterior cingulate gyrus and hippocampus during self-evaluation than during other-evaluation. On the other hand, the schizophrenia patients had higher activation of the right superior frontal and right supramarginal gyri during self-evaluation than control subjects. Only the patient group exhibited hyperactivation in the left hippocampus and right external capsule associated with the other-evaluation task.
Conclusions: These findings provide evidence for an altered neural basis of self-reflective processing, which may underlie the self-awareness deficits in schizophrenia.
Keywords: Neural circuitry; Other-reflection; Schizophrenia; Self-reflection; fMRI.
Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier B.V.