Affective content and contextual constraint in recall by paranoid, nonparanoid, and nonpsychiatric patients.

Asked each of 16 patients in 3 groups-paranoid schizophrenic, nonparanoid schizophrenic, and nonpsychiatric-for verbatim recall after listening to each of 4 tape-recorded passages of verbal material representing 4 levels of constraint and 2 types of affect. 3 hypotheses were tested regarding the differential influence of affectivity and constraint on 3 types of patients. Results do not indicate that recall performance improved with each increase in contextual constraint. However, increasing affectivity of the material did influence the utilization of constraint. When an ordered recall scoring method was employed, recall was found to be significantly better for neutral as opposed to affective material, leading to the conclusion that affect disrupted the semantic meaningfulness of the material while not influencing the total number of words recalled. For paranoids only, recall of neutral material was better than that for affective material at every level of constraint. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)