Valutare l’iper-riflessività schizofrenica: uno studio sperimentale

Hyper-reflexivity refers, to an exaggerated self-consciousness; a tendency to bring into consciousness, aspects of the experience that would normally be experienced as tacit and implicit. In this process, aspects of the normal human experience, that are usually in the background of the experience itself, like the awareness of the act of breathing or feelings that you experience while walking, or the inner speeches that normally median our thoughts, are bring into consciousness. These aspects of the experience are objectified, one might say that, the self that, normally is the subject of the experience, becomes the object (Sass, 1994). This research work is an attempt to validate and make operative the hyper-reflexivity construct as a marker of schizophrenia vulnerability. Hyperrflexivity is a theoretical construct, described by the authors through clinical reports and subjective experiences reported by schizophrenic patients, but there are no experimental studies that have attempted to analyze and grasp the phenomenon from a more operational point of view. The aim is to be able to experimentally validate this construct through the creation of a computer paradigm that is able to grasp implicitly the emergence of the hyper-reflexivity process that characterizes the pathology. Work consists of two constituent parts, the realization of the computerized paradigm and the subsequent experimentation of the same on two groups of subjects: a control group consisting of healthy subjects and an experimental group consisting of schizophrenic subjects. Work, however, is not without limits and the need for future investigations through which to validate the paradigm and to explore more in detail the phenomenon.