Class Notes

Positive Symptom: Thought Disorder

• Disorganized thinking and speech examples include:

  • Loose associations- word association

  • Derailment

  • Thought blocking- dead stop of the thought

  • Neologisms- making up words

  • Clang associations- selecting words based on their rhythmic quality or rhyming rather than any kind of semantic quality (clang, bang, tang, rang)

  • Echolalia- repeating words

  • Word Salad- jumble of words that don’t make any kind of coherent sense

Positive Symptoms: Grossly Disorganized Behavior

• Disorganized behavior: wide variety of bizarre or disrupted behavioral patterns

  • Catatonia

    • waxy flexibility

  • Poor hygiene

  • Agitation

Negative Symptoms

• Affective Flattening- decreased, nonverbal expression of emotion, not giving off the cues that we expect from people

  • ex: saying you’re really excited about something in a really monotone, dull voice

• Anhedonia- lack or absence of positive emotions in things that used to be enjoyable, an actual change in an emotional experience

  • ex: eating a meal and it not tasting very good

• Alogia- a lack of verbal output or decrease in communication

• Avolition- a disrupted behavior a lack of goal-directed behavior

• Asociality- seeking out social interaction less, and dysfunction in social environments

The positive symptoms of schizophrenia show improvement when treated with antipsychotic treatment, the negative symptoms of schizophrenia do not show a lot of improvement when treated with antipsychotic treatment

Impaired Social Functioning

• Social Functioning

  • Social Competence

    • Social skills

    • social knowledge

  • Social judgement

  • Social Cognition

Other Psychotic Spectrum Disorders

• Paranoid Personality Disorder

• Schizoid Personality Disorder

• Schizotypal Personality Disorder- very eccentric, “a person who is so insnae that they are viewed as a genius”

• Brief Psychotic Disorder

• Schizophreniform Disorder

• Schizzoaffective Disorder

Explaining and Treating Schizophrenia

• Demographics

  • Higher rates

    • lower socioeconomic groups

    • urban dwellers

    • biological relatives with schizophrenia spectrum disorders

  • Lower rates

    • Later born siblings

• Course: Age and Gender

  • 3 Phases:

    • Prodromal

    • Active

    • Residual

  • Onset typically early to late 20s

    • male:25-27

    • females:27-30s

  • Equal across genders, but

    • age of onset leter for women

    • Women have higher pre-morbid functioning

• Explaining and Treating Schizophrenia

  • Biological Perspective

    • Brian structure abnormalities

      • enlarged ventricles