Although schizophrenia is often stereotyped as just hearing voices and thinking people are in
your walls, psychosis or positive symptoms only cover a third of the symptoms experienced. The
other two thirds are the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.
This is a total lack of motivation. It's like a boulder pressing down on your body and
preventing you from pursuing any sort of goal, even simple things like making a phone call.
Avolition may look like falling behind on hygiene, not answering texts, and staying in bed all day.
This is an inability to experience pleasure. It's not negative emotion, rather the absence
of positive emotion. It may affect the pleasure that would normally be gained from things like
social situations, eating, touching, or sex.
This is the lack of interest in being with other people.
This one is self explanatory. It may look like staring off aimlessly while someone is speaking to you.
This is the general lack of feeling, emotion, and interest and it can show up as poor hygiene,
or a lack of concern for yourself or others.
"Affect" means emotional expression - flat affect is when there is monotone speech, a lack of
body language and movement, and neutral facial expressions (or an "RBF".) Blunted affect is a
less severe version of flat affect where there is still some emotional expression but not a lot.
Also sometimes considered a positive symptom as a part of disorganized speech, this is
difficulty speaking due to the inability to use detail when communicating. Check the
disorganized speech page for an example.
These are poorly researched and understood, so this is just going to be one paragraph.
There is executive dysfunction, the lack of ability to structure, start, perform, and finish tasks.
There is also impaired memory: the inability to process, remember, and recall information. Impaired
concentration is the inability to focus on tasks. There is also impaired processing ability, the
inability to understand and follow a task or situation. There may also be learning difficulties,
the inability to learn and absorb new skills and information. Other cognitive difficulties include
a slow processing speed, difficulties in verbal learning, difficulties with social cognition
(understanding or relating to others), and difficulties with reasoning and problem solving.