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Query: UMLS:C0036341 (schizophrenia)
 60,220 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Schizophrenia patients might experience difficulties in applying two widely used emotion regulation strategies, reappraisal and suppression. We investigated the relationships among emotion regulation strategies, alexithymia (i.e. inability to identify and verbalize feelings) and the role of pre-morbid IQ on alexithymia in schizophrenia. Participants comprised 31 schizophrenia patients and 44 healthy subjects who were tested on measures of emotion regulation strategies (ERQ), alexithymia (BVAQ) and pre-morbid IQ (NART). Patients reported significantly more use of suppression strategies and tended to use reappraisal strategies less frequently. Patients differed significantly on the cognitive-emotional component of alexithymia. This difference remained significant even with pre-morbid IQ as a covariate, but disappeared with depression as a covariate. Schizophrenia patients have specific difficulties identifying their feelings. These difficulties were related to symptoms of depression. Interventions specifically targeted at affect regulation and recognition of emotional state could promote emotional well-being in schizophrenia patients.
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PMID:Emotion regulation strategies in patients with schizophrenia. 1990 39

Changes in emotional and social behavior are considered to be amongst the most common and debilitating consequences of schizophrenia. However, little is known of the effects of schizophrenia on alexithymia, which refers to impairment in aspects of understanding emotions. In the current study, participants with schizophrenia (n = 29) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) completed self-report and performance-based measures of this construct, in addition to measures of cognitive functioning, clinical symptomatology, and negative affect. The results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia showed increased alexithymia as indexed by the performance task, with these difficulties related to cognitive functioning, and the specific clinical symptom of alogia. However, although the correlation between self-reported alexithymia and negative affect in the schizophrenia group was congruent with prior empirical research and theory, there were no group differences in perceived levels of alexithymia. It is suggested that alexithymia may not be affected per se in schizophrenia (as indicated by the lack of group differences on the self-report measure of this construct), but that schizophrenia-related difficulties do emerge in contexts where cognitive demands are incremented.
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PMID:Alexithymia in schizophrenia. 2037 95

Studies of individuals at ultra high risk (UHR) for psychosis have revealed deviations in cognitive and neural development before the onset of psychosis. As affective impairments are among the core dysfunctions in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, this study assessed emotion processing and the relationship with social competence in adolescents at risk for psychosis. Thirty-four adolescents at UHR for psychosis and twenty-three non-clinical controls completed the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire, a measure of emotion awareness. Social inadequacy was measured using the Dutch Personality Questionnaire. Schizophrenia spectrum psychopathology was assessed using self-report and clinical instruments. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) was used to evaluate intellectual functioning. UHR adolescents showed difficulties in identifying and verbalizing their own emotions, independent of intelligence scores. Emotion awareness problems were related to social inadequacy and schizotypal traits in the high risk group. These findings suggest that UHR adolescents may have reduced emotion awareness, independent of intellectual functioning. The relationship with social inadequate behavior fits with the idea that emotion awareness is a prerequisite for the regulation of emotions in social contexts. In the search for early vulnerability markers of risk for psychosis, studying emotion processing besides cognitive abilities might increase our understanding of 'at risk' developmental pathways.
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PMID:Affective dysfunctions in adolescents at risk for psychosis: emotion awareness and social functioning. 2109 33

Alexithymia is characterized by deficits in emotional self-awareness. Although alexithymia refers to a deficit in recognizing one's own emotions, some studies have focused on the relation between alexithymia and impaired social cognition. An association between alexithymia and schizophrenia has been previously reported, but the brain structures involved remain unclear. The present study investigated associations between alexithymia and specific brain structures to determine whether these regions overlapped with key structures underlying social cognition. Twenty-one patients with schizophrenia and 24 age-, gender- and education level-matched healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. Alexithymia was assessed using the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). We applied voxel-based morphometry to investigate the correlation between TAS-20 scores and regional brain alterations. TAS-20 scores were significantly higher in patients than controls. Bilateral ventral striatum and left ventral premotor cortex volumes were negatively correlated with TAS-20 total scores in controls, while left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) volume was negatively correlated with TAS-20 total scores in patients. These results suggest that schizophrenia is associated with alexithymia, and that gray matter alterations of the left SMG constitute a key pathology underlying alexithymia in schizophrenia. This association may be related to deficits in self-other distinction, self-disturbance, and language processing in schizophrenia.
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PMID:Alexithymia and regional gray matter alterations in schizophrenia. 2130 Jan 13

The editors of this special section commissioned this commentary to bring together some of the conceptual, empirical and measurement issues arising from this series of articles. This commentary explores metacognition in relation to its neurobiology, and diverse syndromes and clinical phenotypes, including schizophrenia, alexithymia, and personality disorders, as well as its relation to assessment and prospects for the further delineation of mechanisms of change in psychological therapy.
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PMID:Metacognition, affect regulation and symptom expression: a transdiagnostic perspective. 2212 54

Emotion recognition is known to be impaired in schizophrenia patients. Although cognitive deficits and symptomatology have been associated with this impairment there are other patient characteristics, such as alexithymia, which have not been widely explored. Emotion recognition is normally assessed by means of photographs, although they do not reproduce the dynamism of human expressions. Our group has designed and validated a virtual reality (VR) task to assess and subsequently train schizophrenia patients. The present study uses this VR task to evaluate the impaired recognition of facial affect in patients with schizophrenia and to examine its association with cognitive deficit and the patients' inability to express feelings. Thirty clinically stabilized outpatients with a well-established diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were assessed in neuropsychological, symptomatic and affective domains. They then performed the facial emotion recognition task. Statistical analyses revealed no significant differences between the two presentation conditions (photographs and VR) in terms of overall errors made. However, anger and fear were easier to recognize in VR than in photographs. Moreover, strong correlations were found between psychopathology and the errors made.
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PMID:Associations between facial emotion recognition, cognition and alexithymia in patients with schizophrenia: comparison of photographic and virtual reality presentations. 2295 34

Alexithymia is characterized by deficits in emotional self-awareness. A number of previous studies have revealed impaired emotional self-awareness in schizophrenia. Although the pathology of schizophrenia is thought to involve disrupted white matter integrity, its relationship with alexithymia remains unclear. The present study investigated associations between alexithymia and white matter integrity, to seek the neural basis of impaired emotional self-awareness in schizophrenia. Forty-four patients with schizophrenia and 44 age-, gender- and predicted IQ level-matched healthy controls underwent diffusion-weighted imaging. Alexithymia was assessed using the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). We applied tract-based spatial statistics to investigate the correlation between the TAS-20 total score and white matter fractional anisotropy (FA). TAS-20 scores were significantly higher in patients than in controls. In the patient group only, FA was negatively correlated with the TAS-20 total score in the corpus callosum, mostly the left part of the superior and inferior longitudinal fasciculi, the inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, the anterior and posterior thalamic radiation, and the precuneus white matter. These results suggest that schizophrenia is associated with alexithymia, and that reduced white matter integrity within these regions constitutes an important pathology underlying impaired self-emotional awareness in schizophrenia.
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PMID:Alexithymia and reduced white matter integrity in schizophrenia: a diffusion tensor imaging study on impaired emotional self-awareness. 2298 45

It is widely accepted that autism is associated with disordered emotion processing and, in particular, with deficits of emotional reciprocity such as impaired emotion recognition and reduced empathy. However, a close examination of the literature reveals wide heterogeneity within the autistic population with respect to emotional competence. Here we argue that, where observed, emotional impairments are due to alexithymia-a condition that frequently co-occurs with autism-rather than a feature of autism per se. Alexithymia is a condition characterized by a reduced ability to identify and describe one's own emotion, but which results in reduced empathy and an impaired ability to recognize the emotions of others. We briefly review studies of emotion processing in alexithymia, and in autism, before describing a recent series of studies directly testing this 'alexithymia hypothesis'. If found to be correct, the alexithymia hypothesis has wide-reaching implications for the study of autism, and how we might best support subgroups of autistic individuals with, and without, accompanying alexithymia. Finally, we note the presence of elevated rates of alexithymia, and inconsistent reports of emotional impairments, in eating disorders, schizophrenia, substance abuse, Parkinson's Disease, multiple sclerosis and anxiety disorders. We speculate that examining the contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of these disorders may bear fruit in the same way that it is starting to do in autism.
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PMID:Mixed emotions: the contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism. 2388 Aug 81

Emotional deficits are among the core features of schizophrenia and both associative emotional learning and the related ability to verbalize emotions can be reduced. We investigated whether schizophrenia patients demonstrated impaired function of limbic and prefrontal areas during associative emotional learning. Patients and controls filled out an alexithymia questionnaire and performed an associative emotional learning task with positive, negative and neutral picture-word pairs during fMRI scanning. After scanning, they indicated for each pair whether they remembered it. We conducted standard GLM analysis and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Both the GLM results and task-related ICA components were compared between groups. The alexithymia questionnaire indicated more cognitive-emotional processing difficulties in patients than controls, but equal experienced intensity of affective states. Patients remembered less picture-word pairs, irrespective of valence. GLM analysis showed significant visual, temporal, amygdalar/hippocampal, and prefrontal activation in all subjects. ICA identified a network of brain areas similar to GLM, mainly in response to negative stimuli. Neither analysis showed differences between patients and controls during learning. Although in previous studies schizophrenia patients showed abnormalities in both memory and emotion processing, neural circuits involved in cross-modal associative emotional learning may remain intact to a certain degree, which may have potential consequences for treatment.
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PMID:Normal brain activation in schizophrenia patients during associative emotional learning. 2414 12

While alexithymia, or difficulties identifying and describing affect, has been commonly observed in schizophrenia, little is known about its causes and correlates. To test the hypothesis that deficits in emotion identification and expression result from, or are at least related to, deficits in neurocognition and affective symptoms, we assessed alexithymia using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), symptoms using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), and neurocognition using the MATRICS battery among 65 adults with schizophrenia spectrum disorders in a non-acute phase of illness. Partial correlations controlling for the effects of social desirability revealed that difficulty identifying feelings and externally oriented thinking were linked with greater levels of neurocognitive deficits, while difficulty describing feelings was related to heightened levels of emotional distress. To explore whether neurocognition and affective symptoms were uniquely related to alexithymia, a multiple regression was conducted in which neurocognitive scores and affective symptoms were allowed to enter to predict overall levels of alexithymia after controlling for social desirability. Results revealed both processing speed and anxiety uniquely contributed to the prediction of the total score on the TAS-20. Results suggest that dysfunctions in both cognitive and affective processes may be related to alexithymia in schizophrenia independently of one another.
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PMID:Alexithymia in schizophrenia: associations with neurocognition and emotional distress. 2479 52


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