Original article

Korean Journal of Schizophrenia Research 2009;12(1):15-23.

정신분열병에서 양가감정의 의미와 적용 및 신경기반

Kyung Mook Choi, MS, Yesie Yoon, MD and Jae-Jin Kim, MD, PhD

Abstract

Since Eugen Bleuler first coined ambivalence as one of the fundamental symptoms of schizophrenia, it is now being considered to be a normal phenomenon of everyday life appearing in normal people as well. In psychopathology, the measurement of ambivalence in schizophrenia patients was very challenging due to the difficulties in detecting the idiosyncrasy of ambivalence. However, after several revisions, Raulin developed the Schizotypal Ambivalence Scale (SAS) that could detect the symptoms of ambivalence peculiar to schizophrenic patients. In psychology, the studies of ambivalence originated from attitude theory and evaluation of normal population, suggesting that positive emotion and negative emotion are on separate dimensions, not on a bipolar dimension. Recently, the studies on ambivalence in perspective of neuroscience began to activate and have tried to find the neural substrate of ambivalence, revealing that ambivalence activates the prefrontal cortex. In the future, the studies on neural substrates of ambivalence in schizophrenic patients versus normal population are anticipated on the basis of psychopathology and psychology. (Korean J Schizophr Res 2009;12:15-23)

Key Words: Ambivalence,Schizophrenia,Evaluative space model,Positivity offset,Negativity bias