Anhedonia in schizophrenia: The role of subjective experiences.

Background: High levels of anhedonia have been found in patients with schizophrenia; specifically they report higher levels of social anhedonia rather than physical anhedonia, and further, in the anticipatory rather than consummatory facets of pleasure. Nonetheless, contrasting results emerged regarding the underlying mechanisms of this deficit. Basic Symptoms (BS) disturb subjective experiences present for most of the illness' course; this impacts patients' daily lives leading to a loss of the ability to organize the experience of the self and the world in a fluid and automatic way.

Mirroring the self: testing neurophysiological correlates of disturbed self-experience in schizophrenia spectrum.

Background: Self-disorders (SDs) have been described as a core schizophrenia spectrum vulnerability phenotype, both in classic and contemporary psychopathological literature. However, such a core phenotype has not yet been investigated adopting a trans-domain approach that combines the phenomenological and the neurophysiological levels of analysis. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between SDs and subtle, schizophrenia-specific impairments of emotional resonance that are supposed to reflect abnormalities in the mirror neurons mechanism.

Facial reactions in response to dynamic emotional stimuli in different modalities in patients suffering from schizophrenia: a behavioral and EMG study.

Emotional facial expression is an important low-level mechanism contributing to the experience of empathy, thereby lying at the core of social interaction. Schizophrenia is associated with pervasive social cognitive impairments, including emotional processing of facial expressions. In this study we test a novel paradigm in order to investigate the evaluation of the emotional content of perceived emotions presented through dynamic expressive stimuli, facial mimicry evoked by the same stimuli, and their functional relation.

Two-year follow-up of borderline personality disorder patients in Italy: a preliminary report on prognosis and prediction of outcome.

Background And Aims: Few naturalistic studies have examined the course of borderline personality disorder (BPD) outside North American countries. The aim of this prospective study was to investigate remission rate, changes in the level of BPD psychopathology and outcome prediction in a sample (n = 46) of Italian BPD outpatients over a two-year follow-up.

Method: Two years after baseline, remission rate from BPD and changes in the severity of BPD psychopathology were investigated.