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The negative syndrome of schizophrenia: three -underlying components are better than two
Maria Paz Garcia-Portilla1, Leticia Garcia-Alvarez2, Anna Mané3
1Department of Psychiatry, University of Oviedo, Spain; Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red, Área de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Spain.
Aims:
To analyse the underlying structure of the negative syndrome of schizophrenia as it is represented in the Brief Negative Symptom Scale.
Methods:
Cross-sectional, multicentre study, employing data from 190 evaluations.
Statistics:
Exploratory factor analysis using the principal component analysis method.
Results:
The three-component solution explained 77.4% of the total variance. Pearson correlation coefficients between components were: 1-2=-0.494, 1-3=-0.117, and 2-3=0.179.
Conclusion:
Our solution favours a three-component structure of the negative syndrome, consisting of: external world (anhedonia and asociality), inner world (avolition and blunted affect), and alogia, with the latter only marginally related to the two former components.
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