Symptoms

There are three types of symptoms in schizophrenia: psychotic symptoms, negative symptoms, and disorganized thinking and behavior. Psychotic symptoms are hallucinations and delusions and are mainly associated with the temporal lobes. Negative symptoms are when a schizophrenic feels and shows no emotion, and rarely talks. The negative symptoms are mainly associated with the frontal lobes. (Mueser and McGurk) Disorganized thinking includes thought blocking (thoughts stop midstream), tangential thinking (off topic and constantly changing speech), and word salad (jumbled speech). Examples of disorganized behavior are catatonia (freezing in one position for a long period of time), echolalia (repeating what other people say), and echopraxia (copying what other people do). (Hyde and Forsyth , 1986)

More recently we have discovered cognitive impairment is involved in schizophrenia. Though not a symptom, cognitive impairments of different kinds are found in all patients with schizophrenia. Cognitive impairment can include problems focusing on a specific or general subject, or a slower reaction time. Scientists are unsure what part of the brain cognitive impairment is associated with (Mueser and McGurk, 2004).