Real-time, subjective third-person experiences and psychiatric disorders in dignity, honor, and face cultures

• Those from face and honor cultures (vs. dignity cultures) were more likely to report real-time, subjective “out of body” experiences. • Such unusual experiences were associated with a variety of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders for those from a dignity culture. • Such experiences had no relation to psychiatric maladies for those from a face culture. • Among those from an honor culture, real-time third-person experiences were especially strongly associated with disorders involving reactive aggression. • Real-time third-person experiencing may be an extension of other ways cultures structure phenomenological experience. Proceeding from the assumption that unusual experiences are sometimes extensions of the normal, we examine a rare phenomenological experience: namely, the real-time, subjective experience of being outside one’s body and looking at oneself as an outsider would. Both face and honor cultures place great emphasis on the self-as-seen-by-others. Thus, past research showed that taking an outsider’s perspective on the self is a more frequent experience in the memory imagery of those from honor cultures and in the memory imagery, mental models, and self-control experiences of those from face cultures, as compared to those from dignity cultures. Here we extrapolate from that past work and show that real-time, subjective out-of-body experiences of taking a third-person perspective on oneself – though unusual – are also found more among those from face and honor, as compared to dignity, cultures. Moreover, whereas such unusual third-person experiences were associated with a variety of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders for those from a dignity culture, they had no such relation to psychiatric maladies for those from a face culture. Among those from an honor culture, real-time third-person experiences were especially strongly associated with disorders involving reactive aggression, consistent with the need to respond forcefully to affronts in order to maintain one’s image in the eyes of others. Real-time third-person experiencing seems an extension of other ways cultures structure phenomenological experience, with implications (or lack thereof) for psychiatric disorders.