Schizophrenia
Welcome to the Schizophrenia research and treatment pages at UC Berkeley Mental Health. Professor Ann Kring and her colleagues are working on research to understand the symptoms of schizophrenia – how they impact the lives of people with schizophrenia and how they can be treated more effectively.
As people with schizophrenia know all too well, some of the symptoms of this illness can influence emotions, relationships with other people, and the motivation to see some tasks through to the finish.
Our research is trying to come up with ways to better recognize these symptoms so we can then develop treatments that are better able to provide some relief. In our research, we use clinical interviews to get a first hand account of a person’s symptoms and how they impact daily life. Our research also uses a number of methods to examine emotion: we care about how people express their emotions; how they experience their emotions; how they think about and manage their emotions.
In the research studies we are currently conducting, we are developing a clinical interview that is better able to fully capture the experiences and symptoms of people with schizophrenia. We are also examining how emotion influences thinking and remembering in people who do and do not have schizophrenia. And we are developing a new treatment for schizophrenia that involves meditation practice to focus and better manage emotions.
