Background. Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic syndrome characterized by widespread pain, fatigue, and cognitive–emotional disturbances. Increasing evidence suggests that FM also involves alterations in bodily self-awareness. In particular, disturbances in interoception and proprioception—key processes underlying the perception and integration of bodily signals—may contribute to the altered bodily experience frequently reported by patients. This review aims to synthesize empirical findings on interoceptive and proprioceptive functioning in FM and to interpret them within a phenomenological framework of embodiment. Methods. A narrative review was conducted using the PubMed database. Studies investigating interoception and/or proprioception in adults formally diagnosed with FM were considered. Interoception included measures of interoceptive accuracy, sensibility, and emotional responses to internal bodily signals, whereas proprioception included joint position sense, movement perception, and postural control. A total of 186 records were identified and screened. After applying inclusion criteria, 19 cross-sectional studies were included in the review. Results. The reviewed studies reported consistent alterations in bodily awareness in FM. Interoceptive functioning was often characterized by reduced accuracy in detecting internal bodily signals, together with increased emotional reactivity and dysregulation associated with bodily sensations. Proprioceptive impairments were also frequently observed, particularly in joint position sense, movement perception, and balance or postural control tasks. Some studies described a paradoxical pattern of heightened attentional focus on bodily sensations alongside impaired integration of these signals into a coherent bodily experience. Conclusion. These findings suggest a disturbance in the integration of bodily signals underlying the experience of embodiment in FM. From a phenomenological perspective, this disturbance may reflect a disruption in coenaesthesia, the pre-reflective sense of bodily self. FM can thus be conceptualized as a disorder of embodiment, consistent with the optical–coenaesthetic disproportion model describing a breakdown between the body as felt from within and the body as perceived from outside.
Introduction: Maternal depression impacts infant cognitive and behavioral development and is linked to reduced maternal sensitivity, negatively impacting mother-infant interaction. Infant's temperament - particularly higher difficulty or lower positive temperament - might moderate this relationship. However, no known study has examined infant temperament as a moderator between maternal psychopathology and mother-infant interaction quality. We hypothesized that greater expression of maternal depressiveness would predict lower interaction quality, moderated by infant’s higher difficult temperament. Methods: This longitudinal study examined the moderating effect of infants’ distress to novelty (Infant Behavior Questionnaire) on the relationship between antepartum maternal depressiveness (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale) and mother-infant interaction quality (coded from the Face-to-Face-Still-Face Paradigm, using the Revised Infant and Caregiver Engagement Phases). Data were collected across pregnancy and postpartum from N = 59 women (n = 38 clinical; n = 21 control). Results: Infants’ distress to novelty moderated the link between maternal depressiveness at 19th - 22nd (b = -.53, p = .04) and 29th - 32nd (b = -.45, p = .02) weeks of pregnancy and interaction quality. Specifically, at high levels of distress to novelty, higher maternal depressiveness was associated with shorter repair intervals in interaction. Conclusion: Contrary to expectations and existing literature, heightened infant distress may prompt more frequent maternal responses, potentially due to increased stress or efforts to soothe the infant. Early interventions should address maternal depressiveness, postpartum interactions, and infant temperament. Tailored approaches may enhance interaction quality and developmental outcomes. Future research should include larger, more diverse samples and examine paternal involvement. Keywords: Face-to-Face-Still-Face Paradigm (FFSF), Infant and Caregiver Engagement Phases (ICEP), Interaction Repair, Peripartum Maternal Depression, Infant Temperament
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders, autism spectrum disorder, and psychopathy may resemble one another at the behavioural surface. All three may involve social difficulties, flattened or atypical affect, unusual communication, interpersonal friction, and impaired social adaptation. Yet their experiential architectures differ in ways that are clinically decisive for differential diagnosis, risk assessment, therapeutic alliance, and environmental design. This narrative review critically synthesizes work in phenomenological psychopathology and 4E cognitive science to clarify how embodiment, enaction, and attunement are altered across these conditions, with attention to lived space, lived time, selfhood, the Other, empathy, and atmosphere. We draw on classical phenomenological psychopathology, contemporary research on minimal self disturbance and anomalous self and world experience, enactive and participatory sense-making accounts of social cognition, and theoretical and empirical literature on autism and psychopathy. Schizophrenia is characterised by instability of minimal self and world openness, including hyperreflexivity, diminished self-affection, altered salience, temporal fragmentation, demarcation disturbances, and atmospheric shifts that may precede overt psychosis. Autism is characterised by differences in embodied sense-making and interactional coordination, frequently involving sensory regulation needs, altered social timing, atypical affordance perception, masking fatigue, and bidirectional mismatch as described by the double empathy problem. Psychopathy is characterised by preserved strategic social understanding with reduced affective resonance, moral emotions, and interpersonal concern, yielding forms of instrumental attunement and distinctive encounter climates. Clinically, targeted phenomenological and second person assessment can improve formulation, reduce diagnostic overshadowing, and guide more differentiated care pathways.
Background: Capgras syndrome has traditionally been conceptualized either as a disorder of belief evaluation or as the consequence of disrupted affective familiarity. In functional psychoses, however, the impostor delusion may represent the endpoint of a progressive transformation of interpersonal experience rather than a sudden delusional event. A phenomenological account of the experiential trajectory preceding its crystallization remains largely undeveloped. Summary: We propose a phenomenologically informed heuristic staging model describing the transition from altered familiarity to Capgras delusion. The earliest phase involves loss of affective familiarity despite preserved perceptual recognition of a significant other. This discrepancy progressively acquires an uncanny quality, followed by perplexity and an escalating search for explanatory meaning. Delusional crystallization occurs when the contradiction between perceptual sameness and affective unfamiliarity is resolved through the impostor hypothesis. Integrating phenomenological psychopathology with cognitive neuropsychiatric models, the proposed sequence conceptualizes Capgras delusion as a process of meaning reconstruction emerging from a prior alteration of lived interpersonal experience. Key Points: Uncanniness, perplexity, and meaning reconstruction are not specific to Capgras and may characterize delusion formation more broadly. We propose that Capgras specificity lies instead in their organization around a distinctive experiential configuration: preserved recognition combined with progressive erosion of affective familiarity, ultimately resolved through impostor attribution. Although heuristic rather than empirically validated, this model generates testable predictions regarding the temporal emergence of altered familiarity, interpersonal perplexity, and delusional misidentification, and may provide a framework for prospective investigation in early psychosis.
Background: Phenomenological research has long provided a foundation for understanding the schizophrenic condition as a whole, yet its contribution to borderline personality disorder (BPD) remains comparatively scattered across different lines of inquiry. Existing phenomenological studies on BPD typically focus on fragmented lived temporality, dysphoric mood, emotion dysregulation and anomalies of lived body and interpersonal experience, often overlooking the affective and sensory impact of a reality experienced as independent of and indifferent to consciousness. To address this imbalance, this paper uses ‘’phenomenological realism’’ to examine BPD psychopathology as an integrated whole, framing this unique feature of borderline self- and world-experience through the concept of ‘’ontic gravity.’’ Summary: The borderline mode of consciousness, especially in states of acute distress, is characterized in terms of an “excess of reality”. By comparing BPD with schizophrenia, the authors highlight a fundamental difference in derealization: while the schizophrenic experience is marked by an “evanescence of reality” and a search for hidden meaning, including one's role in its constitution, the borderline experience involves a traumatic, blunt, and intrusive concreteness. Using the concept of the phenomenological epoché, the paper argues that while schizophrenia resembles an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude, BPD can be understood as a total immersion in it, where the person is unable to distance themselves from what is immediately given as fact. Key Message: The tendency among persons with BPD to feel “crushed” by events during severe distress may be associated with a difficulty in taking a “transcendental” attitude. Unlike the “oblique gaze” of people with schizophrenia that searches for how meaning is constituted, the borderline “direct gaze” tends to experience bodily feelings, encounters with others, and perceptions as raw, physically abrasive facts that imply unmediated suffering rather than reflection.
