Project Summary

Nancy M. Docherty, Ph.D. (Independent Investigator 2002) of Kent State University, will examine a subset of schizophrenia patients who show a marked exacerbation of a specific set of symptoms, formal thought and language disorder in response to arousal of negative emotion.  She is addressing whether this emotional reactivity of thought disorder identified in the laboratory is related to a broader, more global anxiety or arousability and whether it's associated with the degree of stress-responsiveness of an individual's symptoms in the real world.  The project may provide further evidence that emotional reactivity of symptoms is a process discriminator of schizophrenia.  Identifying a process discriminator would allow patients to be divided into more homogeneous subgroups for the study, thus facilitating the elucidation of the underlying disease processes.  If stress-responsiveness of symptoms characterizes a subset of patients and is reflective of an abnormal response to negative emotion, then it might enhance pharmacological and psychosocial treatment studies.

Program Area: SCHIZOPHRENIA/PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS\Schizophrenia

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