Sohee Park

Sohee Park (Photo - Lucius Outlaw/Vanderbilt)

Sohee Park is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University (USA). Dr. Park’s research programme lies at the intersection of clinical, cognitive and social neuroscience. She received her PhD in psychology from Harvard University and completed post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the University Hospital of Zürich (Switzerland). She taught at Northwestern University before moving to Vanderbilt where she directs the Body, Mind & Brain Laboratory.

Her research focuses on understanding the etiology of schizophrenia and the nature of disrupted cognitive and social behaviour in psychosis-spectrum conditions investigating the relationship between the self and the environment with a wide range of methods including behavioural tasks, clinical assessments, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, brain stimulation and virtual reality. Three broad lines of research represent the Park Lab: (1) Working memory & representational guidance of behaviour; (2) Disrupted social cognition; (3) Bodily-self disturbances (see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115547).

She currently serves on the executive boards of the International Consortium on Hallucination Research and the International Consortium on Paranoia Research, two global research networks that aim to elucidate psychosis in the context of culture.

During her stay in Strasbourg, Sohee Park will be hosted by Dr. Anne Giersch (2024 Fellow). She will participate in the International symposium The sense of self: One body, multiple mechanisms (20-21/03/2025) and give a lecture to members of the Strasbourg Translational Neuroscience & Psychiatry Unit (STEP) on empirical studies of self-disorders in psychiatry.

^{Photo - Lucius Outlaw/Vanderbilt}

International Symposium : The sense of self : One body, multiple mechanisms (March 20-21, 2025)

The sense of bodily self seems a straightforward concept at first sight but quickly becomes a mystery when looking closer. Having one unique body seems an evidence, but this sense of bodily self is altered in many instances: out-of-body experiences can occur during meditation or experimental approaches, and can happen in many different pathologies, from vestibular syndromes to psychosis. The mystery is how we achieve the integration of multiple sources of information into the experience of one unique sense of self, and still have access to these threads of information seperately. The sense of bodily self indeed recovers interoceptive, proprioceptive, vestibular and tactile, information, but also agency, body ownership, or the fact that we perceive our environment via these bodily perception channels. Many models have been proposed, and the speakers in this conference will approach the question of the bodily self from different perspectives and disciplines, such as philosophy, experimental psychology neuroscience and psychiatry. The aim of the conference is precisely to bring together specialists of these complementary approaches to discuss the most recent models and data, convergences and divergences.

Organization Committee: Anne Giersch, Iris Trinkler

Steering Committee: Anne Giersch, Iris Trinkler, Christophe Lopez, Tudi Gozé, Michel Cermolacce, Brice Martin

Go to the symposium website

Abstract - Sohee Park

Splitting of the self and bodily self-disturbances, symptom that were central to early conceptualization of schizophrenia, are highly salient and disruptive to individuals with schizophrenia throughout the course of their illness. However, there exists a chasm between the phenomenology that defines one’s subjective illness experience, and the current biological understanding of schizophrenia as a brain disorder. We propose to bridge this divide.
An implicit understanding of one’s own body as a continuously unified entity across time with fixed boundaries is necessary for establishing a sense of self, and this experienced unity of self and body is indispensable for adaptive interpersonal functioning. Thus, specifying neurocognitive and social mechanisms underlying self-disturbances in schizophrenia has significant practical implications for developing targeted interventions, but progress in this area of research has been limited by the subjective nature of bodily self-experiences, and the scarcity of reliable methodological tools to quantify them.
To help close this gap, we investigate cognitive contributions (e.g., working memory, mental representation, imagery, simulation) to the phenomenology bodily self-experiences to elucidate spatial components of self-disturbances that are closely aligned with anomalous agency, body ownership and embodiment. Results indicate that a unique profile of cognitive deficits and enhancements, when combined with social isolation may contribute to an altered bodily self-boundary, dissociative experiences and abnormal embodiment of emotions. Furthermore, preliminary intervention studies targeting social attention and simulation have yielded promising outcome.
To summarize, mechanistic understanding of the origins and consequences of bodily self-disturbances is beginning to crystallize within the framework of social cognitive neuroscience but much remains unresolved. Leveraging recent advances in neuroscience and technology could lead to a better understanding of the elusive behavioral core of schizophrenia in the flesh.