In psychology, alogia (Greek α-, “without”, and λόγος, “speech”[1]), or poverty of speech, is a general lack of additional, unprompted content seen in normal speech. As a symptom, it is commonly seen in patients suffering from schizophrenia, and is considered as a negative symptom. It can complicate psychotherapy severely because of the considerable difficulty in holding a fluent conversation. Alogia is often considered a form of aphasia, which is a general impairment in linguistic ability. It often occurs with mental retardation and dementia as a result of damage to the left hemisphere of the brain.
People can revert to alogia as a way of reverse psychology, or avoiding questions.
| Example of alogia | |
|---|---|
| Alogia | Normal speech |
|
Q: Do you have any children? |
Q: Do you have any children? |
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Alogia is characterized by a lack of speech, often caused by a disruption in the thought process. Usually, an injury to the left hemisphere of the brain will cause alogia to appear in an individual[1]. In conversation, alogic patients will reply very sparsely and their answers to questions will lack spontaneous content; sometimes, they will even fail to answer at all.[2] Their responses will be brief and terse, generally only appearing as a response to a question or prompt. [3]
Apart from the lack of content in a reply, the manner in which the person delivers the reply is affected as well. Patients affected by alogia will often slur their responses, and not pronounce the consonants as clearly as usual. The few words spoken usually trail off into a whisper, or are just ended by the second syllable. Studies have shown a correlation between alogic ratings in individuals and the amount and duration of pauses in their speech when responding to a series of questions posed by the researcher[1][4].
The disability to speak stems from a deeper mental disability that causes alogic patients to have difficulty grasping the right words mentally, as well as formulating their thoughts. A study investigating alogics and their results on the category fluency task showed that schizophrenics suffering from alogia display a more disorganized semantic memory than controls. While both groups produced the same number of words, the words produced by schizophrenics were much more disorderly and the results of cluster analysis revealed bizarre coherence in the alogia group. [3]
Alogia is brought on by frontostriatal dysfunction which causes degrading of the semantic store, the center located in the temporal lobe that processes meaning in language. Schizophrenic patients in a word generation experiment generated fewer words than the unaffected subjects and had limited lexicons, evidence of the weakening of the semantic store. Another study found that when given the task of naming items in a category, schizophrenic patients displayed a great struggle but improved significantly when experimenters employed a second stimulus to guide behavior unconsciously. This conclusion was similar to results produced from patients with Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, ailments which also involve frontostriatal dysfunction.[5]
Medical studies conclude that certain adjunctive drugs effectively palliate the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, mainly alogia. In one study, Maprotiline produced the greatest reduction in alogia symptoms with a 50% decrease in severity. Of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, alogia had the second best responsiveness to the drugs, surpassed only by attention deficiency. D-amphetamine is another drug that has been tested on schizophrenics and found success in alleviating negative symptoms. This treatment, however, has not been developed greatly as it seems to have adverse effects on other aspects of schizophrenia such as increasing the severity of positive symptoms.[6]
Although alogia is found as a symptom in a variety of health disorders, it is most commonly found as a negative symptom of schizophrenia.
The negative symptoms of schizophrenia have previously been considered to be related to a psychiatric form of the frontal lobe syndrome. Studies show that the symptoms of schizophrenia do indeed correlate with frontal lobe syndrome.[7]
Previous studies and analyses conclude that there are three factors that include both the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. These three factors are: alogia, attentional impairment, and inappropriate affect. Studies suggest that an inappropriate affect is strongly associated with bizarre behavior and positive formal thought disorder, attentional impairment correlates significantly with psychotic, disorganization, and negative symptom factors. However, alogia is seen to contain both positive and negative symptoms, with the poverty of content of speech as the disorganization factor, and poverty of speech, latency, and blocking as the negative symptom factor. These results suggest that three dimensions are needed to categorize schizophrenia's negative and positive symptoms.[8]