Self-Identity Recognition In Schizophrenic Patient

Schizophrenia is a complicated mental disorder characterised by negative and positive symptoms,cognitive disorder,and significantly damaged social function.Of these,self-disorders are considered the core pathological feature of schizophrenia.Seemingly different symptoms can be manifestations of self-disorder,and defects in self-processing may be an important cause of abnormal social cognition and social dysfunctionIdentifying the identity of self-other is an important aspect of social cognition and social interaction.The self-face is the strongest stimulus related to the self;it is unique,marks the identity of the individual,and affects the acquisition of self-concept.Similarly,the voice also provides a great deal of information about social cognition,including paralinguistic cues about the speaker?s identity and emotional states;therefore,the human voice is also called the ?auditory face?.But,as the unique identity features,voice and face are physically inseparable from the individual,and face-voice usually appears simultaneously in time and space.Consequently,the brain has to process both face and voice synchronously.In the present study,we aimed to investigate self-identity recognition in the patients of schizophrenia under the presentations of visual,auditory and audio-visual with well-practiced tasks.The results showed that there was no significant difference in the accuracy of face recognition between schizophrenic patients and healthy controls.In addition,the reaction time of patients in self-face recognition was significantly shorter than that of others,and the processing advantage of self-related information in visual was demonstrated,suggesting that visual self-recognition may be intact;However,the accuracy of patients was significantly lower than that of healthy control in voice-identity recognition,which suggested that auditory self-recognition would be impaired.In addition,there was no significant difference in reaction time between self-voice recognition and others' voice recognition in the two groups,which indicated that there might be no processing advantage of self-information in auditory.Similarly,the performance of patients in bimodal was significantly worse than that of healthy control in identity-recognition,suggesting that identity-recognition impairment in the bimodal.Further analysis revealed that identity-recognition impairment in the bimodal was manifested in the following situation: audio-visual identity cues mismatched and focused on auditory identity.Finally,we also found that the reaction time of patients was significantly longer than healthy controls in all tasks,indicating that slow response may be a general feature of schizophrenia.These findings are of great significance for us to understand the core characteristics of schizophrenia and its rehabilitation training.