Schizophrenia-An unsolved puzzle

Schizophrenia is a very complicated condition which has to do with a person’s illusions and hallucinations. When someone claims that sees things or hear things, they are paranoid but they say the truth, because they actually experience such a thing. It is a very difficult situation, because people with schizophrenia try to express themselves but they mostly do it in a non-understandable way for us, and it makes it hard to communicate. We should not criticize them and we must try helping them in any way that is possible. When a person has this disorder it doesn’t necessarily mean that is able to harm others, mostly they tend to harm themselves. In the video that follows you will hear a description of schizophrenia and a patient talking about it.

 

Watch the following video and see closely how a schizophrenic person feels, and understands things.

 

 It is actually very strange for us to even imagine such things, but believe it or not some people are experiencing similar situations.

To treat this disorder is a very complex thing to do. It depends on each incident that a psychologist takes over. Some cases can be treated with medication and many improvements are observed. But for the sickest people, there are not many ways to deal with their symptoms.

In the following video you will see a psychologist that talks how behavioral therapy contributes to enhancing patient’s health.

 

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate social judgments of others based on a variety of complex cues indicating a person's trait and state qualities: Is this person trustworthy, competent, or domineering? Is he or she feeling angry, disappointed, or bored? These social judgments influence our overall impressions of others and are directly related to our social behavior. It is well established that patients with schizophrenia do not accurately judge social cues, such as facial expressions. Importantly, these deficits in social and affective judgments predict social functioning and mediate the relationship between neurocognition and functional outcome. Identifying the mechanisms that contribute to the misinterpretation of social cues in schizophrenia could facilitate the development of effective interventions and ultimately improve outcome. However, at this point, the factors that influence social interpretations in schizophrenia are unclear.

One possible mechanism is that internal or external affective information is exerting inappropriate influence over social judgments and consequently affecting social functioning. That is, patients with schizophrenia may have an impaired ability to control the influence of affective information on social judgments. Affective priming studies with healthy adults demonstrate that judgments, including judgments about a person's state and trait characteristics, are influenced in a mood-congruent manner by the observer's affective state and/or by affective information in the environment that may impact affective state. This bias occurs even when the internal or external affective information has an incidental cause and is irrelevant to the present judgment, thereby contributing to misinterpretations. For example, people are more likely to judge a face as happy after a positive mood prime, such as viewing a pleasant film, and are more likely to judge a face as sad after a negative mood prime, such as viewing a sad film. Those with disorders that are characterized by the persistent elevation of an affective state show interpretive biases even in the absence of priming; people with major depressive disorder are more likely to identify ambiguous facial expressions as sad and less likely to identify them as happy. Affective priming reveals these biases in formerly depressed patients who report normal mood. Importantly, these interpretive biases contribute to the onset and maintenance of illness and are now a target for treatment.

Despite the vast literature on social and affective perception deficits in schizophrenia, reports of interpretive bias are surprisingly rare. However, schizophrenia is a heterogeneous disorder in which internal affective state may be variable across different subtypes and stages of illness. Without direct manipulation of affect, the variation in internal affective state across participants may obscure social judgment biases that exist on an individual level. Furthermore, incidental affective state is most likely to influence judgment when cognitive appraisals of affect are consistent with the nature of the judgment. Feelings of paranoia are common among individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders .Therefore, patients with schizophrenia should be most susceptible to interpretive bias when feelings of threat are elevated and the social judgment pertains to interpersonal safety.