Encephale
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Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional processing. Indeed, major clinical signs of emotional disturbance (eg, anhedonia) suggest that some emotional mechanisms are defective in patients with schizophrenia. Evaluation can be considered as a fundamental component of the emotional system (28) and the first aim of the present study was to test the polarity hypothesis according to which different mechanisms are involved in the evaluation of positive vs negative emotional events. ⋯ Moreover, results suggest that patients with schizophrenia show a deficit in hedonic judgment of social negative and non-social positive stimuli. The later result indicates that the paradox described above becomes clearer whenever the social component of emotional stimuli happens to be taken into account. Results suggest that the polarity and the social component of events evaluated by patients with schizophrenia are critical parameters that should be considered in forthcoming studies that investigate affect disorders in schizophrenia.
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We report the case of a young woman who deve-loped catatonic syndrome a few days after neuroleptic mali-gnant syndrome (NMS), arising the problem of the chronology of both affections. A 20-year old woman with an history of bipolar disorder, experienced an acute manic syndrome that made hospitalization necessary. Fourteen days after loxa-pine prescription, the patient developed a NMS (DSM IV criteria) dyskinesia, dysphagia, fever and alteration of cons-ciousness. ⋯ A catatonic syndrome is regard as an acute form of malignant syndrome. In the other way, a severity scores of malignant syndrome are correlated among catatonic signs. In this case report, we suggest that the neuroleptic malignant syndrome accelerate the evolution to catatonic syndrome.