Relation of formal thought disorder to the communication deficit in schizophrenics.

Evaluated 40 schizophrenics and 20 normals on a social communication task and on an individual cognitive task, both designed to reveal decentering deficits. It was hypothesized that the processes underlying the schizophrenic's thought disorder are formally similar to the processes involved in his deviant organization of social situations, specifically social communication, with both deficits to be interpreted in terms of faulty decentering. Schizophrenics manifested a decentering deficit on both the social communication (p