Laterality and negative symptoms in schizophrenia

W.K. Strik

Schizophrenia is characterized by a high variability of clinical symptoms and of biological findings. Most clinicians are, therefore, convinced that the syndrome consists of a heterogenous group of disorders. Subgroups and dimensions have been defined in order to find more homogenous patient samples, but independent validations are not yet universally accepted. To escape from this century-aged logjam in schizophrenia research, a shift from a humanistical and/or sociological to a psychophysiological psychopathology is considered to be essential.
The presentation will revise the concept of negative symptoms at the light of own empirical findings on abnormal functional lateralization of cognitive evoked potentials, and on the relations with subjective experience regarding lateralized brain functions, i.e., passive and active speech. Based on the findings, a neurophysiological interpretation of the negative symptom axis will be proposed including abnormal functional laterality and the central nervous excitation state.