The electrodermal psychophysiology of schizophrenics and children at risk for schizophrenia: controversies and developments.

A fairly comprehensive review of the psychophysiology of schizophrenia has recently been presented by Venables (1975); however, the opportunity offered here to write a somewhat more idiosyncratic review of work on the autonomic physiology of schizophrenia provides the chance of looking in as wide a context as possible at some areas of research that appear to have provided a certain degree of controversy. The controversy is, however, the stuff out of which progress is made, and although undoubtedly some readers will view this paper as having elements that are too speculative, it is possible that the consequent irritation will provide the spur for future research. This personally biased review will therefore take as its starting points three interlocking sets of findings and will attempt to extend its coverage from them. The three points are all initially concerned with electrodermal activity and are (1) the reports in the work of Gruzelier and Venables (e.g., 1972) of a bimodal distribution of responsivity of skin conductance in a heterogeneous group of schizophrenics, (2) the findings of Mednick and Schulsinger (e.g., 1968) that the fast recovery of the skin conductance response exhibited (in the premorbid state) by offspring of schizophrenic mothers is predictive of their later schizophrenic breakdown and that this fast recovery appears to be characteristic of some adult schizophrenics (e.g., Ax and Bamford 1970 and Gruzelier and Venables 1972) but not of others (e.g., Maricq and Edelberg 1975),