Task 8 Flashcards
What criteria do you have to fulfill in order to have a psychosis?
You have to be unable to tell reality from hallucinations/delusions/illusions.
What are the positive symptoms of schizophrenia?
- Delusions
- Hallucinations
- Disorganized thought and/or speech
- Disorganized or abnormal behavior
What is a negative symptom of schizophrenia?
When something gets “taken away” rather than added:
- Flattened affect
- Anhedonia
- Avolition
- Asociality
Out of the 5 symptoms of schizophrenia, how many have to be present for a diagnosis?
2
What is a delusion of reference?
Belief that everyday things or events have a special significance to yourself or convey some sort of message.
Amy believes that her roommate is planning on getting her out the house using threats. What kind of delusion does she have?
Persecutory
What is the difference between the delusion of thought broadcasting versus the delusion of thought withdrawal.
In thought broadcasting, your thoughts are openly visible to the public, whereas in thought withdrawal, a single other actively extracts thoughts from your mind.
What can be said about the delusion someone from Brazil has versus the ones someone living in the UK might have.
The content may differ according to the culture.
Are hallucinations present only in clinical cases?
No, about 15% of healthy individuals experience some sort of hallucination once a while.
What do we call it, when someone tends to slip between topics when talking?
Derailment
Sometimes, schizophrenic people say words that make sense only to them. What are these words called?
Neologisms
What physiological difference between the genders might contribute to the fact that women suffer less from speech problems in schizophrenia?
In women, the speech centrum in the brain is more bilateral with one side being able to take over for the other.
What is an umbrella term for speech problems?
Formal Thought Disorder
What kind of symptoms fall under the category of disorganized behaviors?
- Catatonia
- Motor agitation
- Mutism
- Catatonic Excitement
- Negativism
What is meant with Catatonic Excitement?
Motor activity without any objective reason or goal/function.
What do we call it when someone shows no response to instructions?
Negativism
What is mutism?
Doing inappropriate postures or gestures
What is avolition?
Inability to initiate or persist at common goal-directed activities (like getting dressed)
What might be a confounding factor in the finding that schizophrenic patients exhibit anhedonia?
- Comorbidity with Depression
- Patients’ inability to fill in self-report forms
- Patients’ inability to overtly show positive emotions
What is the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia?
0,5 - 2%
If a schizophrenia patient has been hospitalized because of the disorder, what does this say about the future?
There is a 50 - 80% chance they will be hospitalized again.
What is a major cause of death in schizophrenic patients?
Suicide - 10 - 15% kill themselves
How many of the patients of schizophrenia tend to recover?
41%
The onset for schizophrenia is often earlier in men. What consequences does this have?
As men’s brains develop later, the earlier onset is even more damaging for their healthy brain development.
What might be a confounding factor in studying heritability of schizophrenia?
Schizophrenic parents might not be able to provide a healthy upbringing to the children, which indirectly results in higher levels of psychosis.
What kind of disease is schizophrenia neurologically?
Neurodevelopmental Disorder
What are main brain abnormalities in schizophrenic patients?
- Reduced cortical gray matter
- Abnormal Hippocampal activation
- abnormalities in the PFC
- Enlarged Ventricles
What is a structural abnormality in the brain that is often an early sign for schizophrenia?
Abnormalities in white matter structures
What is the content of the original dopamine theory and why was it abolished?
Symptoms of schizophrenia can be caused by excess dopamine
-> Proved too simple
How did the revised dopamine theory build on the original one?
It stated, that excess dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway and low levels in the PFC are contributing factors to schizophrenia.
Why might serotonin receptors be involved in schizophrenia?
Because Serotonin neurons regulate the activity of dopaminergic neurons in the mesolimbic pathway
What are points of criticism against the use of typical antipsychotics?
- Around 25% of patients don’t respond to the drugs
- negative symptoms are left untreated
- high relapse rate after treatment
- severe side effects including tardive dyskinesia (involuntary movements of facial muscles, which is irreversible)
What kind of drug is Clozapine (Clorazil)?
Atypical Antipsychotic
What are advantages of atypical antipsychotics over typical ones?
- They reduce negative symptoms as well as positive
- Side effects are present but do not include tardive dyskinesia
What are central aspects in each of the treatment paradigms: Cognitive, Behavioral, Social?
Cognitive: Recognize and change demoralizing attitudes
Behavioral: Social learning and operant conditioning
Social: Increasing contact between patients and other people
Why might family treatments be a good option for schizophrenic patients?
- Families have to be taught how to deal with the disordered family member in order to improve his chances
- The family can help maintain a drug or other therapy
Schizophrenic patients tend to use a number of cognitive biases. What are they?
- Jumping to conclusions
- Maladaptive Attributional Style
- Metamemory
- Bias against disconfirming evidence
- TOM deficits
Why is a maladaptive attributional style related to schizophrenia?
- Patients often cast blame for events onto specific other people, rather than objectively evaluating the event
What character trait that many schizophrenic people have contributes to their maladaptive attributional style?
Low self-esteem
What is metamemory?
- Overgeneralized Memories
What is a strength of MCT (Metacognitive Training)?
It helps reduce cognitive biases
Schizoaffective Disorder can be seen as a mixture of which two kinds of disorders?
Schizophrenia and a Mood Disorder
What is special about Schizotypal Personality Disorder?
Patients exhibit a lifelong pattern of oddities, but have a grasp on reality.
When comparing auditory hallucinations of healthy and schizophrenic people, what did Daalman et al. find?
- The number, loudness, identity and location of hallucinations were not different between the subject groups.
- The main difference lays in the frequency, the control over them, and the emotionality of the content.
- In healthy subjects, the onset for hallucinations was found to be earlier.
- Explaining the hallucinations in a supernatural way was actually more common among healthy participants.
Which finding of the frontal lobe model of schizophrenia was found to be incorrect?
Hypofrontality
