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CCN Seminar

Dr Preethi Premkumar, London South Bank University, 'The social side of schizotypy: From physiological arousal to functional neural networks in response to social stress.'

Abstract Schizotypy is a latent organisation of personality traits that represent an endophenotype of the path to schizophrenia. The biosocial stress diathesis model of schizophrenia indicates that there is a biological predisposition for the schizotypal personality.

Environmental stressors include social stress and these social stressors interact with the biological predisposition to increase the vulnerability for schizophrenia.

The challenges of family adjustment to schizophrenia are explained in the theory of expressed emotion. My research delineates the altered neural response to family stress in schizotypy.

This talk will explain the neurophysiological signature of schizotypy through a social lens by drawing on brain structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, quantitative EEG and event-related potentials.

State-of-the-art methods of brain signal processing, namely tensor factorisation and machine learning, are presented. Thus, the neurophysiological signature social schizotypy consists of the neural response to criticism, praise, rejection, acceptance and, more broadly, social anxiety.

Finally, the talk will present a biosocial theory of schizotypy and the role of schizotypy as a benign state of vulnerability to psychosis. 

For any queries or information please contact: elizabeth.lee@brunel.ac.uk