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Measures And Conceptualizations Of Symptoms In Schizophrenia, Nina B. Paul

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Schizophrenia presents as a heterogenous disorder characterized by diverse expression of symptoms between individuals. Thus, clinicians and researchers rely on comprehensive symptom measures for diagnosis and treatment. This dissertation investigated two symptom measures, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS; Kay, Fiszbein, & Opler, 1987), a commonly used scale that assesses a broad range of symptoms of schizophrenia, as well as the Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS; Kirkpatrick et al., 2011; Strauss et al., 2012), a novel scale that focuses on the assessment of five negative symptom domains (i.e., anhedonia, asociality, avolition, blunted affect, and alogia). The first study of …