Sitting on the red line listening to music when all of a sudden a woman walks onto the train. She is clearly mumbling barely audible words to herself in what sounds like a string of incoherent sentences. Then she begins to get louder and her sentences more structured. What barely seemed understandable, turns in to a rage of angry words and emotions; resembling something along the lines of spoken word poetry. From what you can make out the woman is yelling at the very top of her lungs at someone (but clearly no one) who mistreated her. Her voice is so extremely piercing that everyone stops to stare in awe. As bizarre as this may sound, this actually happened. Sitting on the train I could not help but to think...this woman has got to be schizophrenic!
When most people think about the mental disorder schizophrenia, they think about individuals who are socially and emotionally out of touch with reality. Just like the woman on the train, their sense of social surroundings seems to be impaired during emotional and raging fits. With paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions being the most common symptoms, it is easy to think of schizophrenics as emotionally unstable and expressive individuals. Recently, I came across an article that somewhat conflicts with this view. Research has shown that schizophrenics are actually less expressive of their emotions than individuals without schizophrenia. Now, with all of the movies displaying emotionally dramatic schizophrenics, such as Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (which by the way is an AWESOME movie!), and after this bizarre experience with the woman on the train, I question to what extent is this true. Through empirical research and studies utilizing fMRI and PET, it has been shown that there is an apparent disconnect between the outward display of emotion and feeling with schizophrenic individuals.
Recently in class we talked about the manipulation of basic emotions and the mechanisms involved in its neurological pathways. University of California's department of Psychology reviewed naturalistic and elicitation studies in which researchers evoked emotion responses among schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic participants, and assessed one or more components of emotional response including expression, experience and physiology. They evaluated how these emotion response measures correspond to schizophrenic sympotms, focusing particular attention on sex differences. In general, elicitation studies found that schizophrenics display fewer observable facial expressions in response to evocative stimuli or situations. Yet despite that overwhelming evidence, researchers also find that schizophrenics report experiencing similar, and in many cases, greater amounts of emotion compared to healthy individuals. In the physiological assessment through elicitation studes, schizophrenics exhibited greater skin conductance reactivty than non-schizophrnics in response to evocative film clips, eve though they displayed very few observable facial expressions. A number of studies have also found that in response to positive facial expressions, pictures, and film clips schizophrenics display just as much or less zygomatic (cheek) muscle activity, which is typically associated with positive emotion, than corrugator (brow) muscles activity, which is typically associate with negative emotion. With negative stimuli schizophrenics show comparable or greater corrugator stimuli. However, in general, schizophrenics show more corrugator muscle activity in response to positive stimuli than healthy control individuals. This is thought to reflect the concentration or puzzlement due to the fact that evocative stimuli may require more effort for schizophrenics.
With all of the conflicting research that study emotion deficits in individuals with schizophrenia, it is hard to say in which situations, if any at all, do schizophrenics differ in emotional responses. Read the article and tell me what you think. Or better yet, take a ride on the CTA red line and observe for yourself.
I've gotta second you on "A Beautiful Mind" and also seeing people with similar emotions or rages on the L. So I had a few questions:
ReplyDelete1) Does the article imply that Schizophrenics have greater emotional responses rather than smaller emotional responses spread out through the day?
2) What do you think allows non-schizophrenics to show less amounts of emotion in general? And How does having more consistent and smaller emotional responses contribute to a healthier lifestyle?
I understand if one says that schizophrenics don't have emotions as a response to daily events, than the previous question might be void.