Self-concept, emotion and memory performance in schizophrenia

The “self-reference effect” describes better memory for material someone has related to one's self previously. Schizophrenia can affect aspects of the inner self such as own thoughts or actions. Schizophrenia symptoms, therefore, might not only have an influence on the self-concept, including the self-attribution of positive or negative personality traits, but also reduce the self-reference effect. 15 schizophrenia patients and 15 matched healthy controls were asked to decide on positive and negative personality traits across three separate conditions: self-evaluation, other evaluation (of an intimate person), and during a lexical control task, respectively. An unannounced recognition task followed. Patients revealed a negative bias in the evaluation of themselves and of the well-known other person. The reference to a person (oneself, close other) increased later recognition performance. However, patients with schizophrenia revealed an overall decreased recognition performance. The amount of patients’ passivity symptoms, i.e., an increase in the permeability of their “self–other boundary”, correlated negatively with their recognition performance for previously self-referred characteristics and traits referred to the intimate other. This was not the case for lexically processed stimuli or an increase of negative symptoms. Our data underline the necessity of taking into account symptom subgroups when dealing with specific cognitive dysfunctions in schizophrenia.