Explicit and Implicit Sense of Agency in Depersonalization Experiences

The sense of agency, i.e. the subjective feeling of voluntarily controlling one’s bodily actions is profoundly altered in Depersonalisation (DP henceforth), a condition that makes people feel detached from one’s self and body. The intentional binding (IB henceforth) effect has been proposed as an influential implicit measure of the sense of agency. IB refers to the phenomenon of perceived temporal compression between a voluntary action and its subsequent consequence. To examine the link between DP and the sense of agency in non-clinical population, an online study was conducted, combining the IB task as an implicit measure of the sense of agency with self-reports measuring the explicit sense of agency. Our study found no significant differences between individuals with low and high occurrences of DP experiences with regards to implicit sense of agency. However, a trend for participants with higher occurences of DP experiences to display a steeper slope, i.e. a more time-sensitive explicit sense of agency was observed. Specifically, whilst temporal estimations were significantly different for short intervals in the Baseline condition for the High and Low DP groups, this difference was not significant in the Operant condition, suggesting that action might “help” DP participants with high scores to experience the same temporality with participants scoring lower on the depersonalization scale.