...Cecilia Maria Esposito; Giovanni Stanghellini Background: Phenomenological literature has recently given much attention to the concept of atmosphere, which is the pre-individual affective tonality of the intersubjective space. The importance of atmospheres in psychopathology has been described...

...Louis Sass; Matthew Ratcliffe “Atmospheric” alterations are key aspects of altered subjectivity in mental disorder. Karl Jaspers famously described the “delusional mood”: a sense of uncanny salience and ominousness that often precedes the onset of schizophrenic psychosis or of delusions...

... to be a disruption in so-called ‘affective familiarity’. Sensory information regarding the world is divided into the ‘overt pathway’ of perceptual inputs and the ‘covert pathway’ of ‘atmospheric cues’. In hallucinating subjects, we suggest that a breakdown of the grasping of atmospheric qualities in the environment...