Emergence of Language Related to Self-experience and Agency in Autobiographical Narratives of Individuals With Schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia Bulletin March 15, 2023 Chi C Chan, Raquel Norel, Carla Agurto et al. 22 citations
Disturbances in self-experience—the sense of being the subject of one's own experiences and actions, and of being distinct from others—are central to schizophrenia. Traditionally assessed by manual interview rating, this study used natural language processing to analyze autobiographical narratives from 167 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 90 healthy controls, totaling 490,000 words. Topics related to self-experience and agency were significantly more expressed in patients than controls and were decoupled from emotional tone, semantic coherence, and burden-related concepts. A classifier trained on these features discriminated patients from controls with an AUC of 0.80. These findings demonstrate that NLP can automatically detect higher-order metacognitive aspects of self-experience without explicit probing.