A map of physiological sensations that accompany certain emotions in schizophrenics was presented by researchers from the United States of America on the pages of the specialized publication Schizophrenia Bulletin.
“We collected two and a half dozen patients with schizophrenia and asked them to mark the areas of the body that are most felt with some kind of emotion. We compared the resulting maps of emotional sensations with those made by healthy people,”says Leni Torregrosa of Vanderbilt University, lead author of the study.
Physiological manifestations of emotions, that is, the sensations experienced in various psychological states, are the result of the activity of the autonomic nervous system. Goosebumps arising from fear, or "butterflies in the stomach" that appear in lovers - all these are manifestations of the activity of the autonomic nervous system.
In schizophrenics, this system works somewhat differently than in healthy people, which is not surprising, since violation of the connection between consciousness, body and external environment - one of the main manifestations of this mental disease.
“The physiological manifestations of emotion described by people with schizophrenia generally differ little from each other. In healthy people, these manifestations look much brighter,”says Torregrosa, adding that the emotion maps obtained from the study can be used as an additional diagnostic tool.
Kolesnikov Andrey