VOL. 3, NO. 1,1977 psychophysiology and schizophrenia

Of all of the behavioral disorders, schizophrenia has most captured the interest of psychophysiologists. This is is partly because unusual levels of arousal, the tradi-tional core interest of psychophysiologists, are often quite apparent on the ward and because abnormal attention and information processing, central issues in the psychology of schizophrenia, are now being so fruit-fully approached with cardiovascular and average evoked potential techniques. However, the psychophysiologists' viewpoint is also critical for three major problems of biological research in schizophrenia—separating etiologic and resultant effects on biological measures, assessing internal states in individuals with disordered communi-cation, and documenting individual differences in bio-chemical abnormalities especially if they affect only a small portion of the brain. First, the schizophrenic's long-term unusual or bizarre behavior may produce unusual physiological or bio-chemical abnormalities unrelated to the etiology of the disease. A game of tennis in the sun may bring serum sodium values up outside normal limits. However, we do not diagnose a new psychiatric disease named hyper-natremic hypermobility syndrome (HHS) because we have detailed knowledge of the physiologic and psycho-social mechanisms involved and can obtain an adequate history. Such is not so clearly the case with the schizo-phrenic syndrome, and the path to its understanding is littered with hundreds of discarded physiological and biochemical findings. The psychophysiologist is especially oriented to this problem as the field has traditionally taken pains to discriminate between physiological responses resulting from metabolic needs, and those resulting from psychological events (see Lader 1975). *Reprint requests should be addressed to the author at Bldg