Rethinking Social Agent Representation in the Light of Phenomenology

摘要

Bell, Mills, Modinos, and Wilkinson (2017) present social agent representation (SAR) as a useful heuristic framework for understanding social cognition in psychosis. SAR involves the ability to create and maintain internal representations of social actors that may break down in psychosis. Indeed, at least in terms of explicit content, psychotic symptoms often thematize a misrepresentation of social agents. For example, hallucinatory "voices" might be attributed to more or less identified entities or individuals, and certain delusional themes (e.g., paranoid delusions) may involve single or multiple persecutors. Bell and colleagues argue that current cognitive models of psychosis poorly address its social nature, and future research should therefore move from errors in self-other attributions to a consideration of how the experience of illusory others comes to dominate social cognition in psychosis.