When Peter Clayson was an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University majoring in psychology and Russian, he did scholarly research on the brain science behind cognitive and emotional processing — work that included participating in two published studies. Today, Clayson is now working towards his Ph.D. at UCLA as a clinical psychology graduate student minoring in behavioral neuroscience. "I selected UCLA," Clayson said, "based on the professor I wanted to work with, Dr. Cindy Yee-Bradbury," a world-renowned expert on schizophrenia who conducts research on the psychophysiological correlates of emotional processing in the disorder.
As a member of Yee-Bradbury’s research team in the Laboratory of Clinical Affective Psychophysiology, Clayson is investigating the effects of stress on working memory processes across the course of schizophrenic, seeking to better understand how patients with schizophrenia react to different kinds of stress in various phases of the illness. Among the core features of schizophrenia, memory deficits, attentional impairment and disrupted emotional processing are prominent.
"I am researching the extent to which emotional processing may remain intact in patients with schizophrenia," Clayson said. "I am particularly interested in what is working correctly rather than going awry in schizophrenia."
Among the research methods Clayson and his fellow researchers are using are interviews and behavioral measures of clinical symptoms, life stress and coping, as well as measures of brainwave activity and heart rate activity.
By identifying the processes that seem to remain intact during schizophrenia, treatment plans can be created that capitalize on these "islands of intact functioning," Clayson said.
This story is adapted from the original published by the UCLA Fund in its "Gifts at Work" series.
