Clinical Psychopathology of Negative Symptoms: A Phenomenological Perspective

Abstract

Negative symptoms encompass a broad constellation of psycho-behavioral phenomena, including affective flattening, poverty of speech, alogia, avolition, social withdrawal, apathy and anhedonia. These phenomena obviously exert a substantial impact on personal autonomy, quality of life and broad functional outcomes, ultimately being an important challenge for clinical decision-making and therapeutic support. In recent years, the attention to negative symptoms in schizophrenia has revamped, boosting the development of new rating tools as well as a broader conceptualization of derivative constructs (e.g. apathy, amotivation, anhedonia). However, despite its behavioral expressivity, the in-depth phenotypic characterization of negative symptoms remains partly unaddressed. Similarly, their clinical intertwining with other non-productive clinical features (e.g. anomalous subjective experiences, cognitive-perceptual basic symptoms and schizotypal features) is generally overlooked. Therefore, the current presentation specifically offers a stratified overview of the phenomenology of negative symptoms filtered through lens of clinical psychopathology.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.