Mélissa C Allé

• Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology and Neurosciences
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Lille

Prolonged social isolation is known to cause alterations in conscious experience, such as hallucination, and cognitive problems. Surprisingly, although COVID-19 quarantine policies involved long periods of physical confinement and isolation, little is known as to whether this was associated with alterations in consciousness and cognition. We conduc...

Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by severe memory alterations, affecting especially memories of personal past events. Until now, autobiographical memory impairments have been characterized using formal memory assessments, requiring patients to strategically and deliberately recall past events. However, contrary to this highly co...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by an alteration of the sense of self, particularly self-continuity. While former studies focused on the recollection and narrative of single past events, the present study aimed to explore autistic individuals’ narrative identity by assessing for the first time their life story, described as the most...

Until now, most studies investigating the relationship between event segmentation and memory have used videos filmed from a third-person perspective, although people experience their lives from a first-person perspective. The present study aimed to determine whether visual perspective impacts events segmentation and further recall. Fifty-seven part...

Autobiographical memory has been found to be severely impaired in schizophrenia, but previous work has largely treated both as unitary concepts. Here, we examined how various dimensions of autobiographical memory relate to different aspects of psychosis. Individuals from the general population were recruited online (Study 1, n = 264; Study 2, n = 3...

Background Previous research has reported that patients with schizophrenia would regard false memories with higher confidence, and this meta-memory deficit was suggested as a neurocognitive marker of schizophrenia. However, how schizophrenia patients determine their memory decision confidence has received scant consideration. This study, therefore,...

Dans le chapitre 34, Christin Camia et Melissa Allé abordent la notion d’identité narrative et la façon dont le récit de souvenirs autobiographiques permet de reconstruire le passé, en lien avec le présent et le futur du nar- rateur. Les auteures nous expliquent de quelle façon le narrateur parvient, grâce au récit du passé, à réinterpréter et réév...

Autobiographical memory disorders are well described in schizophrenia. Current research on patients’ memory impairments aims to: 1) better understand the cognitive processes responsible for those difficulties, and 2) develop new methods to palliate autobiographical memory disorders in schizophrenia. The present review describes how the use of weara...

The worldwide outbreak of CoronaVirus Disease appeared in 2019 (COVID-19) has forced millions of people into social isolation. Past research has documented negative psychological effects of self-isolation during health crises, in terms of stress, anger or depressive symptoms, but overall ignored psychotic symptoms and cognitive problems. The presen...

We conducted a longitudinal online study to examine attenuated psychotic symptoms (APS) over time in a sample of locked-down individuals. We used (i) questionnaires and (ii) the automatic analysis of the emotional content of narratives. Participants ( N = 162) were recruited to complete an online survey 4 times between March and June 2020 (T1, T2,...

Patients with schizophrenia show severe autobiographical memory impairment, thought to reflect retrieval deficits caused by executive dysfunction. However, prior research has focused exclusively on strategic (voluntary) retrieval, and ignored involuntary retrieval resulting from automatic and associative processes, involving minimal cognitive contr...

Schizophrenia is associated with memory disorders that affect patients in their daily life. Patients complain about difficulty to remember knowledge that has been recently learnt together with its context (episodic memory, EM) but also more complex events that have been personally experienced (autobiographical memory, AM). While deficits at both en...

Involuntary autobiographical memories are mental representations of personally experienced past events that come to mind spontaneously, with no preceding attempt to recall them. They have been showed to be more frequent and more emotional in the psychosis continuum. Although schizophrenia is strongly associated with thought disorders, including cog...

We examined relationships between vicarious life stories for mothers and distant others, personal life stories, and well-being. Participants described chapters in their mothers’ and personal life stories, self-rated chapters on emotional tone and meaning, and completed well-being measures. In Studies 3 and 4, participants described chapters for dis...

Autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in schizophrenia affects the richness of detail in personal memories and is one of the major predictors of patients’ social functioning. Despite the empirical evidence attributing these difficulties to a defective encoding process, cognitive remediation interventions targeting AM in schizophrenia often focus...

Résumé Les effets psychologiques de l’isolement ont déjà été décrits dans la littérature (expéditions polaires, sous-marins, prison). Néanmoins l’échelle du confinement mis en œuvre à l’occasion de la pandémie à COVID-19 est inédite. Il nous faut non seulement relire les études publiées, mais aussi anticiper les problèmes psychologiques qui pourrai...

The prevalence of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, and theories suggesting a link between autobiographical memory and hallucination, raise the possibility of a dominant role of auditory imagery in autobiographical remembering in patients with schizophrenia, whereas visual imagery is dominant in autobiographical memory of healthy adults. Th...

Cognitive disorders are considered as a core symptom of schizophrenia. Importantly, episodic autobiographical memory deficits are strongly related to patients’ social dysfunction. Although the cognitive mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory deficit are highly important to open the door for specific cognitive remediation, they are yet to be...

People with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and envisioning their future. However, while alterations of event representation are well documented, little is known about how personal events are located and ordered in time. Using a think-aloud procedure, we investigated which strategies are used to determine the times o...

Background Various aspects of self disorders have been reported in schizophrenia and some authors have regarded them as core symptoms of the illness. Autobiographical memory (AM) encompasses the memory of past personal events but also future thoughts and numerous self-related information, such as self-images. Objectives Investigating AM in order t...

The relationship between hallucinations and stressful life events in psychosis is recognised, and has recently been supported by findings showing that the frequency of involuntary autobiographical memory and future projection predicts hallucination-proneness in the general population. To better understand the nature of this relationship, an online...

Involuntary (spontaneously arising) autobiographical memories and involuntary future thoughts are common in daily life, but their frequency and emotional intensity vary among individuals. Theories of hallucination in schizophrenia have hypothesized a key role for involuntary memories (Waters et al., 2006); however, this idea has been little examine...

Autobiographical memory, central in human cognition and every day functioning, enables past experienced events to be remembered. A variety of disorders affecting autobiographical memory are characterized by the difficulty of retrieving specific detailed memories of past personal events. Owing to the impact of autobiographical memory impairment on p...

L’objectif de nos travaux de thèse était de mieux comprendre les troubles de l’identité dans la schizophrénie, et en particulier les perturbations du sentiment de continuité de soi dans le temps. Dans ce but, nos recherches ont consisté en une analyse exhaustive de la cohérence narrative de récits de vie recueillis auprès de patients schizophrènes...

Background: Disorders of the self, such as a reduced sense of personal continuity in time, are a core symptom of schizophrenia, but one that is still poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated two complementary aspects of self-continuity, namely phenomenological and narrative continuity, in 27 patients with schizophrenia, and compare...

Les troubles de l’identité dans la schizophrénie ont été longtemps considérés comme un symptôme central de la maladie, et ce dès ses premières descriptions cliniques. Jusqu’à récemment, leur compréhension a reposé principalement sur des réflexions cliniques ou philosophiques. Dans cet article, nous proposons une synthèse théorique des études portan...

Objective: Life narratives of patients with schizophrenia are characterized by impaired coherence so that the listener has often difficulties to grasp the life trajectory of the patients. In order to better understand what causes this reduced temporal coherence, we investigated the temporal structure of patients' life narratives through different...

Objectives: Life narratives of patients with schizophrenia offer unique material to explore patients’ subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self observed in schizophrenia. Material and methods: We used two protocols to collect life narratives of patients with schizophrenia and control subjects. A validated...

Patients with schizophrenia and people with subclinical psychotic symptoms have difficulties getting a clear and stable representation of their self. The cognitive mechanisms involved in this reduced clarity of self-concept remain poorly understood. The present study examined whether an altered way of thinking or reasoning about one's past may acco...

Disorders of the self, such as the “loss of continuity” of the self in time, are a core symptom of schizophrenia, but one, which is still poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated two complementary aspects of self-continuity, namely phenomenological and narrative continuity, in 27 patients with schizophrenia, and compared them with 2...

The self or identity is often seriously challenged by the emergence of psychotic symptoms. A first reason for that is most likely due to the traumatic experience caused by the sudden emergence of hallucinations or persecutory ideas that challenge both the representation of oneself and that of the world and others. A second reason is linked to the s...

Self-narratives of patients have received increasing interest in schizophrenia since they offer unique material to study patients’ subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self that accompanies schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the life narratives and the ability to integrate and bind memories of p...

Meta-analyses and reviews on cognitive disorders in schizophrenia have shown that the most robust and common cognitive deficits are found in episodic memory and executive functions. More complex memory domains, such as autobiographical memory (AM), are also impaired in schizophrenia, but such impairments are reported less often despite their negati...