Present and future selves in Parkinson’s disease

ABSTRACT

The study of the self in neuropsychological patients raises not only theoretical questions on the relationships between the self, autobiographical memory (AM), and episodic future thinking but also clinical issues for patients’ daily life and care. We addressed this issue in Parkinson’s disease patients for whom AM and future thinking impairments have been documented. All patients and controls generated and dated up past and future self-images and provided associated past and future events. Our findings suggest a subtle pattern of preservation/impairment of different dimensions (quantitative and qualitative) of self-images, which rely partially on the episodic quality of past and future events.

KEYWORDS:

• Self
• identity
• autobiographical memory
• future thinking
• Parkinson’s disease

Acknowledgments

Alexandra Ernst is a Marie Curie COFUND postdoctoral fellow supported by a research grant from the European Union and the University of Liege. We are grateful to patients and healthy controls from West Yorkshire who participated in this study. We also thank Sarah Smith for her help with the recruitment of patients and Chris Moulin for his comments and for having edited the manuscript. The drafting of this paper was made possible by research funding from the Region de Bourgogne (France) awarded to Céline Souchay and Chris Moulin.

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout the article, the generic term “self” will thus specifically refer to declarative forms of self-knowledge and the specific terms “self-concepts” and “self-images” will be used interchangeably.