Neural correlates of schizophrenia

• What are neural correlates?

  Patterns of structure or activity in the brain that occur in conjunction with an experience and may be implicated in the origins of that experience.
• Neural correlates of negative symptoms:

  Avolition involves the loss of motivation. Motivation involves the anticipation of a reward and the ventral striatum is believed to be particularly involved in this anticipation. Juckel et al. (2006) have measured activity levels in the ventral striatum in schizophrenia and found lower levels of activity in those observed in controls. Thus activity in the ventral striatum is a neural correlate of negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
• Neural correlates of positive symptoms:

  Allen et al. (2000) scanned the brains of people experiencing auditory hallucinations and compared them to a control group whilst they identified pre-recorded speech as theirs or others. Lower activation levels in the superior temporal gyrus and anterior cingulate gyrus were found in the hallucination group, who also made more errors than the control group.