Original article

Korean Journal of Schizophrenia Research 2009;12(2):90-95.

정신분열병 환자에서 가상환각간섭수행과제의 유용성에 대한 예비연구： 병식 수준과의 관련성 고찰

Jin-Kook Heo, MD1, Kyung-Min Park, MD1, Soo-Hee Choi, MD1, Ji-Yeon Park, MA2, Mi-Yeon Hong, MS2, Young-Seok Shin, MS3, Jeonghun Ku, PhD3, Sun I. Kim, PhD3 and Jae-Jin Kim, MD, PhD1,2

Abstract

Objectives:Patients with schizophrenia usually lack the ability to assess and properly admit the impact of their mental illness on their lives. The present study was designed to evaluate the relationship between the level of insight and the function of processing or executing the contextual information in patients, who had experienced auditory hallucinations.
Methods:Using the scale to assess unawareness of mental disorder (SUMD), 21 schizophrenic patients with experience of auditory hallucinations were divided into good-insight group (n=11) and poor-insight group (n=10). Including normal controls (n=12), all subjects were required to explore and collect 8 travel items in the virtual hallucination-interfering performance task, which was designed to virtually simulate daily living with auditory hallucinations. The response level of each group was measured by the time for completing the task under the 3 different voice conditions, consisting of situation-control (SC；no voice stimuli), situation-relevant (SR) and situation-irrelevant (SI).
Results:Good-insight patients were found to need more time for completing SI condition than SR condition, which was similar to the case of normal control group. On the contrary, poor-insight patients showed no significant difference in completing time among the conditions.
Conclusion:
Resultssuggest that good-insight patients are more sensitively influenced by the virtual auditory hallucination and more carefully try to integrate external voice stimulus into information processing, if it is irrelevant in the social context.(Korean J Schizophr Res 2009;12:90-95)

Key Words: Schizophrenia,Insight,Virtual auditory hallucination,Social context.