New Way To Help Schizophrenia

Sufferers' Social Skills

ScienceDaily (Sep. 12, 2008) — Researchers from the University of Newcastle in
Australia are investigating a new way to help schizophrenia patients develop their
communication and social skills.

PhD student Kathryn McCabe is studying the eye movements of people with
schizophrenia to understand better how they view other people's faces.

Ms McCabe said the ability to recognise facial expressions and social clues was impaired
in people with schizophrenia.

"For most people this ability is relatively automatic and an essential component of good
social and interpersonal communication, but people with schizophrenia struggle to
interpret facial displays of emotion," she said.

"This may contribute to the formation of psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations,

delusions and social withdrawal, and interfere with vocational and educational
achievement."Ms McCabe hopes to determine whether the difficulty in reading facial
expression can be changed using remediation training.

"Despite the widespread availability of medication for people with schizophrenia, other
treatment options are also needed.

"We have developed a training program that we hope will help people with schizophrenia
to participate socially and pick-up on facial clues."Ms McCabe is recruiting people
between 18 and 65 who have schizophrenia to assist in her research. Participants will be
asked to take part in a weekly interview and half-hour testing session for six weeks where
their eye movements are recorded during a series of tasks.

Ms McCabe is conducting her research under the supervision of Dr Carmel Loughland,

with the support of the Schizophrenia Research Institute Natasha Snow Postgraduate
Scholarship. Natasha Snow passed away in 2003 after battling schizophrenia and the
scholarship is an in memoriam donation from her family.The study is being conducted in
association with the University's Priority Research Centre for Brain and Mental Health
research and the Hunter Medical Research Institute's (HMRI) Brain and Mental Health
program.

HMRI is a partnership between the University of Newcastle, Hunter New England Health
and the community.
Schizophrenic Patients' Frozen Faces Harm Social
Interactions
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2009) — Non-verbal communication, in the form
of facial expressions, may be impaired in people with schizophrenia.
Researchers have now shown that deficits in non-verbal expressivity in
schizophrenia are linked to poor social skills and an unawareness of the
thoughts and intentions of others.

Martin Brüne from the University of Bochum, Germany, led a team of

researchers who used interviews and psychological tests to gauge whether
reduced nonverbal expressivity could be linked to patients' social-cognitive
impairments and poor social competence. He said "We were able to show
that patients with schizophrenia were reduced in their non-verbal expressivity
during an interview that explored psychopathological symptoms and
subjective factors of distress. Moreover, we found that patients with the lowest
level of nonverbal expressivity performed more poorly on a test that tapped
into the comprehension of others' minds than patients whose nonverbal
expressivity during interviews was within the range of healthy controls."

The ability to "mentalise", to accurately imagine the thoughts, feelings or

intentions that another person is experiencing, is known to be impaired in
schizophrenic patients. Brüne and his colleagues have previously shown that
this impairment is associated with poor social skills. He said, "By showing that
a link exists between non-verbal expressivity and the inability to mentalise, we
hope to better specify the factors that actually guide and motivate patients'
interpersonal nonverbal behaviour".

Brüne speculates that poor mentalising abilities contribute to patients' reduced

use of the nonverbal behaviours that invite and sustain social interaction in
conversation, and that reduced signals of this type then contribute, in part, the
difficult and unappealing nature of conversation with schizophrenic patients
Autism And Schizophrenia Share Common Origin,
Review Suggests
ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2008) — Schizophrenia and autism probably
share a common origin, hypothesises Dutch researcher Annemie Ploeger
following an extensive literature study. The developmental psychologist
demonstrated that both mental diseases have similar physical
abnormalities which are formed during the first month of pregnancy

Peculiar toes

Developmental psychologist Annemie Ploeger has investigated whether there

is a connection between disorders in the first month of pregnancy and the
development of schizophrenia and autism. Interestingly, many physical
abnormalities of autistics are also prevalent in schizophrenics. For example,
both autistics and schizophrenics sometimes have protruding ears and
peculiar toes. There are also differences: a large head and intestinal
problems, for example, are typical traits occurring in autistics. From this,
Ploeger concluded that the two disorders share a common origin. The same
error that occurs very early in pregnancy develops into autism in one
individual and schizophrenia in another.

Early vulnerability

Ploeger's research reveals that in the period between 20 and 40 days after
fertilisation, the embryo is highly susceptible to disruptions. In this period,
early organogenesis, there is a lot of interaction between the different parts of
the body. If something goes wrong with a given part of the body, it greatly
influences the development of other parts of the body. As people with
schizophrenia and autism frequently have physical abnormalities to body
parts formed during early organogenesis, Ploeger concluded that the
foundation for these psychiatric disorders is laid very early during pregnancy.

The existence of a relationship between unhealthy behaviour during

pregnancy and the subsequent development of schizophrenia and autism in
the child was already known. However, Ploeger's hypothesis that the early
organogenesis stage is the most critical, is new. Ploeger bases her
hypothesis on an extensive study of scientific literature in this area. She often
had to make use of related studies; although a lot of research has been done
into prenatal influences on the development of schizophrenia and autism, little
is known about the influence that the period between 20 to 40 days after
fertilisation has.
Toxic pregnancy medicine

For example, she acquired information about autism from a study into
softenon use. Softenon is a drug against morning sickness that was
administered to women in the 1960s and 1970s. Later it was discovered that
severely disabled children were born as a result of this medicine. Autistic
children were born in four percent of pregnancies in which softenon was used,
whereas normally this figure is 0.1 percent. Women could state exactly when
they started to take softenon. The women who had taken softenon between
the 20th and 24th day of the pregnancy had the greatest chance of giving
birth to an autistic child.

Ploeger advises women to stop risky behaviour such as smoking, medicine

use and stressful activities before they even become pregnant. If you only
start to live healthily once you know that you are pregnant, the basis for a
disrupted development of your child could already have been laid.

Ploeger's research was partly financed by NWO is within the research

programme Evolution and Behaviour. The doctoral thesis "Towards an
integration of evolutionary psychology and developmental science: New
insights from evolutionary developmental biology" was defended on 3
December 2008. The supervisor was Prof. H.L.J. van der Maas, associate
supervisors: Dr M.E.J. Raijmakers, Dr F. Galis