In the clinical linguistics of schizophrenia, syntactic complexity has received much attention. In this study, we address whether syntactic complexity deteriorates within the six months following the first episode of psychosis in those who develop a diagnosis of schizophrenia. We collected data from a cohort of twenty-six first-episode psychosis and 12 healthy control subjects using the Thought...
BACKGROUND In the last two decades, much neuroscientific research has been done on the pathomechanisms of catatonia. However, catatonic symptoms have mainly been assessed with clinical rating scales based on observer ratings. Although catatonia is often associated with strong affective reactions, the subjective domain of catatonia has simply been neglected in scientific research. METHODS The...
Background: Reduction of positive symptoms is often the focus of psychiatric treatment for patients with psychosis; however, it is becoming increasingly clear that some patients experience ambivalence towards positive symptoms or may even experience them as pleasant. The present study extends upon work from online studies of patients without verified diagnoses. The first aim was to examine the...
OBJECTIVE To investigate the trajectories of diminished expression and apathy over 10 years. Further, to explore the effects of baseline- and persistent cannabis use on the development of diminished expression and apathy during follow-up, while controlling other potential sources and predictors of secondary negative symptoms. METHODS 351 participants with a first episode of non-affective...
Background: Metacognition refers to appraising one's thoughts and behaviours. Deficits in metacognition are associated with psychosis-spectrum experiences, such as hallucinations and delusions, in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Assessments of metacognitive function and abilities in clinical populations often vary in administration duration, and subjectivity of scores. This study...
Schizophrenia ResearchAugust 25, 2022Olga Santesteban-Echarri, Lu Liu, Madeline Miller et al.
Cannabis use is more prevalent among youth at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis than healthy controls (HC). There is mixed evidence as to whether cannabis use is associated with increased severity of attenuated psychotic symptoms (APS) or whether current cannabis use is associated with the transition to psychosis. This study aims to assess cannabis use differences between CHR youth and HC...
Symptoms of insomnia and frequent nightmares are prevalent in psychotic disorders, and are associated with psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in the non-clinical population. Whereas the role of impaired sleep in psychosis was extensively examined by longitudinal and interventional approaches, studies on the association between psychosis and dream quality are scarce, and mainly cross-sectional....
BACKGROUND Attention deficits have been considered to be a central characteristic of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. However, the specific interactions with, and longitudinal effects of, cannabis use at the different stages of the disorder remain unknown. Due to the high percentage of patients who are cannabis users at the onset of the disease, our objective was to explore this relationship...
Obsessive-compulsive symptoms are frequent in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and often cause differential diagnostic challenges, especially in first-contact patients. Drawing upon phenomenology of cognition, we critically review classic and contemporary psychopathological notions of obsessive-compulsive phenomena and discuss their relevance for differential diagnosis between...
Hallucinations are considered characteristic symptoms of psychosis and part of the 'psychosis superspectrum' of the Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP) initiative. To gain insight into their psychopathological relevance, we studied their dimensional placement within a single dense transdiagnostic network constituting of basic symptoms as well as of attenuated and frank psychotic,...
Mindfulness meditation (MM) and its alignment with the mind-body perspective of health in Chinese cultures indicate its potential to benefit Chinese patients with psychosis. This is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to address the following questions: (1) Does MM improve clinical, well-being, and third-wave outcomes (i.e., mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion levels) among...
BACKGROUND For adults with psychosis, international guidelines recommend individual and family based cognitive behavioural therapy interventions. Recommendations are extended to children and adolescents, based on adult research. It is also recommended that psychological interventions are offered for childhood presentations of psychotic-like or Unusual Experiences (UE), in the absence of a...
The association between cannabis use and negative symptoms remains unclear because of inconsistent results in existing studies. In this study we aimed to investigate the association between different aspects of cannabis use and 1) diminished expression and 2) apathy as a two-dimensional model of negative symptoms in a sample of 460 participants with first-episode psychosis. Data were collected...
Background: A Growing body of literature indicates therapeutic effectiveness of mindfulness for mental disorders. Only few trials have been conducted with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), mostly in outpatient settings. Primary objective was to assess feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary outcomes of mindfulness-based group therapy (MBGT) for in-patients with SSD. Methods: A...
OBJECTIVE The nature of associations between recent cannabis use and negative symptoms, positive symptoms, and neurocognitive deficits remains unclear. In a relatively large sample of well-characterized patients with first-episode psychosis, we hypothesized that, compared to first-episode patients without cannabis use in the three months prior to first hospitalization, those having used...
Background: Depersonalization and derealization are currently considered diagnostically distinct from first-rank symptoms (FRS) seen in schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses. Nevertheless, the lived experiences of these symptoms can be very similar phenomenologically. Aims: To investigate the interrelationships between depersonalization, derealization and FRS in patients with different types of...
Experimental research has shown that poor sleep triggers psychotic experiences, even in healthy participants. This warrants an in-depth investigation of this mechanism in a naturalistic environment, an exploration of which particular aspects of poor sleep trigger psychotic symptoms, and a test for reverse effects of symptoms on sleep. For this purpose, we conducted a 14-day ambulatory...
Cannabis can induce acute psychotic symptoms in healthy individuals and exacerbate pre-existing psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Inappropriate salience allocation is hypothesised to be central to the association between dopamine dysregulation and psychotic symptoms. This study examined whether cannabis use is associated with self-reported salience dysfunction and schizotypal...
Self-alienation is a common characterization of various disturbing experiences in patients with schizophrenia. A vivid example comes from patient reports of not recognizing themselves when inspecting their specular image in the mirror. By applying the multisensory paradigm of the Enfacement Illusion, this study empirically addresses the specular Self-Other discrimination in patients with...
Meditation-based mind-body therapies (yoga, tai-chi, qi-gong, mindfulness) have been suggested to have a potential therapeutic effect on negative symptoms. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) examining effectiveness of yoga, tai-chi, qi-gong and mindfulness on negative symptoms of schizophrenia, using different databases and trial...
A disturbance of "minimal self," - of the immediate sense of mine-ness inherent in experience-is hypothesized to be the core disturbance in schizophrenia. Research with the Examination of Anomalous Self Experience (EASE) has demonstrated the selective aggregation of anomalous self-experiences in the schizophrenia spectrum. Conceptual research suggests that anomalous world experiences, including...
In the last decades, biological and environmental factors related to psychosis were investigated in individuals at ultra-risk for psychosis (UHR) to predict conversion. Although religion relates to psychosis in a variety of ways, it is understudied in subclinical samples. Therefore, we assessed the interplay between religion and prodromal symptoms in 79 UHR and 110 control individuals. They...
In the tradition of phenomenology, minimal selfdisturbance has been suggested as a manifestation of the core pathogenesis of schizophrenia; however, the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Here, in line with the concept of "cognitive dysmetria," we investigated the cerebro-cerebellar default mode network (DMN) connectivity and its association with pre-reflective minimal selfdisturbance...
Basic self-disturbances (BSDs) are considered core features of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and are present in the prodromal, early psychotic and chronic phases. Considerable levels of BSDs are also present at first treatment in some patients with psychotic disorders outside the schizophrenia spectrum. There is limited knowledge about the stability of self-disturbances over time. To...
Trait-like anomalies of subjective experience (aka, Basic Self-disturbance or Self-disorder, SD) have been empirically identified as schizophrenia-specific markers of vulnerability in several clinical and genetic high-risk populations. However, such specificity is still to be tested in developmental years, where emerging psychopathology is less crystallized and diagnostic boundaries more...