Mental Health News
Researchers at the University of Georgia provided insights into the difficulties of emotion regulation in schizophrenia. The study is published in the journal European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience.
The Study
Researchers compared clinical data from outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia and a healthy control group. They studied the processes and stages of emotional regulation and how people with schizophrenia suffered from emotion regulation abnormalities.
The Findings
The results revealed how people coping with schizophrenia tend to experience a greater number of negative emotions—including the highest state of anxiety and emotional distress—than people without schizophrenia. As the volume of negative emotions increases, the likelihood of the successful regulation of emotion in schizophrenia decreases.
Therefore, schizoid people fall back on a rather “learned helplessness” or “defeatist beliefs” and are prone to navigating difficult situations negatively. They also refrain from employing coping strategies to healthily regulate their emotions.
One of the lead researchers, Gregory Strauss, elaborated: “[Our study determines how the] youth are at risk for schizophrenia. Heightened stress reactivity has long been seen as a key risk factor, but these results suggest that regulating that stress response must also be considered. If the same problems are also present years before the illness onset, tailored psychological treatments may have promise for preventing schizophrenia.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Raugh, I. M., & Strauss, G. P. (2022). Deconstructing emotion regulation in schizophrenia: the nature and consequences of abnormalities at the identification stage. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 272(6), 1061–1071. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-021-01350-z