Essay Example on Schizophrenia PSZ is a mental Disorder

Insert Paper Title Here Schizophrenia PSZ is a mental disorder that affects people with their daily activities Green Kern Heaton 2004 and is associated with deficits in attention Bleuler 1911 Nuechterlein Dawson 1984 Although there are Attention consists of spatial attention and feature based attention subdivisions Spatial attention involves directing attention to a location in a place It mainly allows selectively process visual information through prioritizing of an area Feature based attention involves directing attention to a specific stimulus feature avoiding distraction There are some things that the recent study revealed First unlike healthy control subjects attentional dysfunction in PSZ shows extreme processing of information in a small subset This is the cause of abnormal eye movement reaction times and event related potentials e g Gray et al 2014 Hahn et al 2012 Leonard Kaiser et al 2013 Luck et al 2014 Second when people with PSZ are informed about a location in advance their behavioral benefits increase Bustillo et al 1997 Gold et al 1992 Hahn et al 2012 Liotti Dazzi Umilta 1993 Sapir Henik Dobrusin Hochman 2001 Spencer et al 2011 Third in Useful Field of View UFOV task it was revealed that people with PSZ usually fails to span spatial attention UFOV task requires simultaneous processing at fixation and in the periphery Elahipanah Christensen Reingold 2010 2011 Gray et al 2014 Hahn et al 2012 

Therefore people with PSZ has an advantage if the task was asked for narrow but intense focusing of spatial attention However they can also have a disadvantage if the task was asked for a broad distribution of spatial attention Fourth spatial attention and feature based biasing was Although the characteristics of PSZ was done there weren't any treatments developed for this disorder The treatment remains to be done The authors are trying to research about PSZ in the hopes that the research will be useful to design treatments for people with PSZ The hypothesis of the study is PSZ would show a narrower focus of attention than HCS around the central task relevant location Again the authors are hoping to find some research that would help design treatment for people with PSZ The kind of research method used was correlation study between people with PSZ and HCS The authors Carly J Leonard Steven J Luck James M Gold Benjamin M Robinson and Britta Hahn of Altered Spatial Profile of Distraction in People With Schizophrenia first picked some people who had the criteria for schizophrenia schizoaffective disorder and HCS Their goal was to evaluate the participant s spatial profile of feature based distinctions in a task In the task the participants were supposed to view a rapid serial visual presentation stream of letters at the display center and search for letters at the display center and search for a target letter of a specific color within that stream There were various distractions from various distance which either matched or mismatched that specific color 

From this task it was revealed that both PSZ and HCS performed the task really well However the individual differences in performance among PSZ and HCS had really big difference There were a negative correlation between no distractor performance and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale composite positive symptom score There were also no relationship between no distractor performance and a factor score for disorganized symptoms Overall the strength of the study was that all the participants were free if medical or neurological comorbidity that might influence the experiment including substance abuse or dependence within the last twelve months The weakness for this study was that this was a correlation study Correlation study is not a causation study References Kazdin A E n d Schizophrenia treatment Retrieved January 16 2018 Green M F Kern R S Heaton R K 2004 Longitudinal studies of cognition and functional outcome in schizophrenia Implications for MATRICS Schizophrenia Research 72 41 51 http dx doi org 10 1016 j schres 2004 09 009 Bleuler E 1911 Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias L Zinkin Trans New York NY International Universities Press Nuechterlein K H Dawson M E 1984 Information processing and attentional functioning in the developmental course of schizophrenic disorders Schizophrenia Bulletin 10 160 203 Gray B E Hahn B Robinson B Harvey A Leonard C J Luck S J Gold J M 2014 Relationships between divided attention and working memory impairment in people with schizophrenia Schizophrenia Bulletin 40 1462 1471 Bustillo J R Thaker G Buchanan R W Moran M Kirkpatrick B Carpenter W T Jr 1997 Visual information processing impairments in deficit and nondeficit schizophrenia The American Journal of Psychiatry 154 647 654 Elahipanah A Christensen B K Reingold E M 2010 Visual search performance among persons with schizophrenia as a function of target eccentricity Neuropsychology 24 192 198 http dx doi org 10 1037 a0017523