Operationalizing Disembodied Interaction: The Perceptual Crossing Experiment in schizophrenia Research

Embodied and phenomenological approaches to neuropsychiatry have proven to be promising for assessing social cognition and its impairments. Second-person neuroscience has demonstrated that the dynamics of social interaction make a difference when it comes to how people understand each other. This article presents the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE) as a paradigm for studying real-time dyadic embodied interactions in the context of schizophrenia. We draw on the phenomenological concept of interbodily resonance (IR) and show how the PCE can be used to accurately model and assess IR. We then turn to disembodied interaction in schizophrenia and finally propose the PCE as a translational tool for systematically assessing the hindered IR that individuals with schizophrenia suffer from. We offer an experimental approach to phenomenology which could be informative for the development of more embodied interventions aiming to remedy the profoundly disrupted social life that patients with schizophrenia live with.