ELECTRODERMAL DYSFUNCTIONS AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

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This competing continuation application proposes two large projects to study the skin conductance orienting response (SCOR) and startle eye-blink modification (SEM) in order to better understand attentional and affective disorders in schizophrenic outpatients and putatively psychosis-prone college students. Attentional and affective dysfunctions have long been considered central deficits in schizophrenia, but have proven complex and difficult to measure. SCOR and SEM have been hypothesized to provide non- verbal, non-voluntary indices of basic attentional and affective processes; hence they may provide unique keys to understanding these dysfunctions in schizophrenia. The overall aim of the first project, which consists of a package of five experiments, is to evaluate the contribution of automatic and controlled cognitive processing in the mediation of SCOR and SEM. All five experiments in the first project require subjects to perform a difficult visual tracking primary task while SCOR and SEM are measured to either task-irrelevant stimuli or secondary task stimuli. The rationale is that if the primary tracking task is resource-demanding, then it will engage a considerable proportion of limited processing resources, leaving only a few resources to process concurrent stimuli. Thus, it will be possible to determine the effects of varying the available processing resources on SCOR and SEM in normal college students, putatively psychosis-prone college students, recent-onset schizophrenic patients, and demographically matched normal controls. The overall aim of the second proposed project, which consists of a package of three experiments, is to develop a new paradigm to separately evaluate attentional and affective modulation of SEM. These experiments will test theoretically derived hypotheses in groups of normal college students, anhedonic college students, recent-onset schizophrenic, patients, and demographically matched normal controls. These experiments will address issues regarding the affective specificity of emotional dysfunctions and will constitute the first test of affective modulation of SEM in schizophrenic patients.