精神分裂症遗传学研究的理性思辨

精神分裂症是一种常见的重性精神障碍,属于复杂的多基因遗传性疾病。随着分子生物学技术和遗传学数据分析方法的进步,精神分裂症易感基因方面的研究取得了一定的进展,但是至今还没有一个精神分裂症的易感基因得到准确定位。系统生物学是采用系统科学的方法研究一个生物系统的一种大科学,为寻找精神分裂症等复杂疾病的易感基因提供一种新的思路。     

精神分裂症遗传学研究的理性思辨

精神分裂症是一种常见的重性精神障碍,属于复杂的多基因遗传性疾病.随着分子生物学技术和遗传学数据分析方法的进步,精神分裂症易感基因方面的研究取得了一定的进展,但是至今还没有一个精神分裂症的易感基因得到准确定位.系统生物学是采用系统科学的方法研究一个生物系统的一种大科学,为寻找精神分裂症等复杂疾病的易感基因提供一种新的思路.     

Creativity and Psychoticism: An Overinclusive Model

There is increasing research evidence that religious involvement is associated both cross-sectionally and prospectively with better physical health, better mental health, and longer survival. These relationships remain substantial in size and statistically significant with other risk and protective factors for morbidity and mortality statistically controlled. In this article, we review the social and psychological factors that have been hypothesized to explain the health-promoting effects of religious involvement. The four potential psychosocial mechanisms that have received empirical attention are health practices, social support, psychosocial resources such as self-esteem and self-efficacy, and belief structures such as sense of coherence. Evidence concerning these potential mediators is mixed and inconsistent, suggesting there is more to be learned about the pathways by which religion affects health. Other possible explanations for the salubrious effects of religious involvement on health and longevity are discussed.     

Emotion in Schizophrenia: Where Feeling Meets Thinking

Our understanding of the nature of emotional difficulties in schizophrenia has been greatly enhanced by translational research over the past two decades. By incorporating methods and theories from affective science, researchers have been able to discover that people with schizophrenia exhibit very few outward displays of emotion but report experiencing strong feelings in the presence of emotionally evocative stimuli or events. Recent behavioral, psychophysiological, and brain imaging research has pointed to the importance of considering the time course of emotion in schizophrenia. This work has shown that people with schizophrenia have the ability to experience emotion in the moment; however, they appear to have difficulties when anticipating future pleasurable experiences, and this perhaps affects their motivation to have such experiences. While advancements in our understanding of emotional experience and expression in individuals with schizophrenia have been made, these developments have led to a new collection of research questions directed at understanding the time course of emotion in schizophrenia, including the role of memory and anticipation in motivated behavior, translating laboratory findings to the development of new assessment tools and new treatments targeting emotional impairments in people with this disorder.     

Schizophrenia

ABSTRACT— Theoretical conceptualizations of schizophrenia have undergone significant change in the past century. Through the application of behavioral science methodology, psychologists have played a major role in the pivotal scientific advances that have led us to contemporary models. The field has moved from simplistic conceptualizations of mind–brain distinctions to models that encompass complex gene–environment interactions and neural pathways that mediate the relation between psychosocial events and brain dysfunction.     

Schizophrenia and emotional rubbernecking

Orienting toward emotionally salient information can be adaptive, as when danger needs to be avoided. Consistent with this idea, research has shown that emotionally valenced information draws attention more so than does neutral information in healthy individuals. However, at times this tendency is not adaptive, and it may distract the individual from goals. People with schizophrenia (PSZ), though they frequently show deficits in attentional control, have also been shown to exhibit diminished recognition of and attention to emotional information. In the present study, we investigated how the presentation of emotionally salient information affected performance on a working memory task for PSZ and healthy controls (HC). We found that although hit rates were equal to those of HCs for PSZ, the PSZ made fewer false alarms—resulting in overall better performance—than did the HCs. Deficits in emotional processing in PSZ appear to provide an advantage to them in situations in which salient emotional information competes with active cognitive goals.     

Schizophrenia and the Developmental Moratorium

Jay B. Sisun is a Clinical Research Assistant at Taunton State Hospital. Glen A. Eskedal is the Chair and Professor of Education and Human Services at Suffolk University. Of challenge to developmental psychologists and mental health practitioners is the management of positive and negative symptoms associated with schizophrenia and their effects on mastering psychosocial developmental tasks. The intent of this article is to provide specific information pertinent to understanding this disorder, to understand the age-appropriate struggle for individuation, and to offer recommendations for effective treatment.     

Schizophrenia and B-lymphocyte alteration--a hypothesis

We studied the immunglobulin synthesis of peripheral blood lymphocytes of healthy blood donors and of patients suffering from acute schizophrenia and endogenous depression. The detection of cytoplasmic immunglobulins was performed by immunofluorescence. The schizophrenic patients showed an increased immunglobulin synthesis without cultivation of lymphocytes, after cultivation for 7 days and after pokeweed mitogen stimulation. This activation of B cells could be the result of disturbances in the prostaglandin formation and activation.     

Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self

A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment.