ABSTRACT
Self-face processing is often compromised in mental disorders with impaired self-awareness, such as schizophrenia and social anxiety disorder. Patients with schizophrenia exhibit abnormalities in self-face recognition and self-referential processing, which may be attributed to dysfunctions of the mirror neuron system and default mode network. On the other hand, patients with social anxiety disorder show excessive self-focused attention and negatively distorted self-beliefs, which may be related to frontoparietal attentional network dysfunctions during self-face processing. The core pathology of these disorders in self-face processing may be defective self-other discrimination in schizophrenia and excessively negative self-imagery in social anxiety disorder. Impairments in self-face processing can also be observed in other mental disorders characterized by the inability to recognize one's own states or traits, and thus more mental disorders are likely to turn out to be self-disorders.
