Movement Therapy For Schizophrenia

The movement therapy could be effective in schizophrenia treatment. The therapy trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies and includes some forms of yoga and dance.
The conclusion is based on a new study that shows schizophrenics have a weakened sense of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion made use of in the research produced the first case of a spontaneous, out-of-body experience in the laboratory.
The study, which appears in the Oct. 31 issue of the scientific journal Public Library of Science One, measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia patients and 21 matched control subjects by testing their susceptibility to the “rubber hand illusion” or RHI. This tactile illusion, which was discovered in 1998, is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand.
“After a while, patients with schizophrenia begin to ‘feel’ the rubber hand and disown their own hand. They also experience their real hand as closer to the rubber hand.” said Sohee Park, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Psychology and Psychiatry, who conducted the study with doctoral candidate Katharine Thakkar and research analysts Heathman Nichols and Lindsey McIntosh.
“Healthy people get this illusion too, but weakly,” Park continued. “Some don’t get it at all, and there is a wide range of individual differences in how people experience this illusion that is related to a personality trait called schizotypy which is associated with psychosis-proneness.”