Assessing the Sense of Self

Abstract

Can there be a science of the sense of self? If science is the objective study of general principles, beyond the particularities of individuals, can the subjective sense of self ever be described, measured, and modeled in scientific terms? Prior work suggests that the patients’ subjective experience of their identity may be associated with important health outcomes, such as quality of life, depression, and suicide ideation (Nizzi et al., 2012). Yet, clinicians do not have reliable measures to assess the sense of self of their patients. Developing informative, implementable psychometric tools to assess the sense of self may provide a novel perspective on our conceptualization, diagnosis and treatment of multiple conditions frequently seen in neuropsychology consults. My aim is to develop an empirical, clinically relevant approach to assessing the sense of self. This dissertation presents three components of this line of research. Study 1 examines the context-dependence of the ways in which Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is represented by non-specialists in two different cultural settings, Paris and Boston. Study 2 investigates how four components of the sense of self (self-knowledge, mirror self-recognition, the bodily distinction between self and other, and self- reported age) vary across three stages of AD. Building on this earlier work, Study 3 reports on the development, validation and first clinical application of a new tool to assess the sense of self, called the Verbal Self Fluency task.