Patterns of ego boundary disturbance in neurotic, borderline, and schizophrenic patients.

As part of a series of articles addressing unresolved conceptual and empirical questions regarding structural diagnosis and the borderline concept, this study examines differences in the representation of interpersonal boundaries among neurotic, borderline, and schizophrenic patients. Drawing on the contributions of Blatt and his colleagues, a Boundary Disturbance Scale was constructed by applying a developmental continuum of boundary representation to a traditional ego psychological analysis of thought disorder on the Rorschach. The results of the study support the hypothesis that severe borderline psychopathology can be conceptualized as a failure to maintain the inner-outer boundary, that schizophrenia involves a deficit in maintaining the distinction between self and others, and that meaningful developmental distinctions between diagnostic groups can be made on the basis of the Rorschach. The findings demonstrate the broad explanatory scope gained by a developmental object relations model in clarifying perplexing diagnostic and conceptual issues involving borderline phenomena on the Rorschach, specifically, (1) the representation of boundaries, (2) the cognitive disturbance involving the inner-outer boundary, and (3) the nature of the short-lived, circumscribed psychotic... (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Responses of A and B subjects to normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, and ambiguous communications.

Investigated the initial reactions of 20 A and 20 B undergraduates to "encounter situations" in which they were asked for help by 4 hypothetical patients communicating in normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, or ambiguous styles. For each patient communication, Ss responded to the following questions: (a) "What might he mean?" (b) "What might he be feeling?" (c) "How would you feel in this situation?" (d) "What do you think you would do?" Results indicate that (a) A's more frequently interpreted patient communications symbolically than did B's; and (b) A's exhibited greater congruence than B's, as indicated by their greater use of feeling words in describing their reactions to the hypothetical patients. Results were related to previous A-B findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A semantic analysis of a normal and a neurotic therapy group.

"The purpose of the research… was to see if S's entering therapy can be differentiated from persons that have never been in therapy by meanings they associate with certain selected concepts and to test for areas where semantic changes followed therapy, especially as they may relate to parental identification… . The findings indicate that control S's can be differentiated from therapy S's prior to therapy by the meaning they attribute to the concepts of the self and of parents… therapy affects the self-estimate and not the judgment of parents… ." The research is related to the findings of Rogers and Dymond (1954), Greenspoon (see 30: 4488), and Verplanck (see 31: 2940) on verbal reinforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reduced growth hormone responses to amphetamine in "endogenous" depressive patients: studies in normal, "reactive" and "endogenous" depressive, schizophrenic, and chronic alcoholic subjects

Several pharmacological stimulation tests of the pituitary-hypothalamic system have been used to investigate psychiatric disorders. This study introduces amphetamine sulfate as a stimulus for human growth hormone (HGH) release in various psychiatric patients. Peak HGH release after a single intravenous administration of amphetamine sulfate, 0.1 mg/kg, was significantly lower in nine "endogenous" depressives (P = .01) and significantly higher in seven "reactive" depressives (P less than .05) as compared to normal subjects, whereas peak HGH release in eight schizophrenics and six chronic alcoholics did not differ significantly from that in normal subjects.     

The experience of aloneness, object representation, and evocative memory in borderline and neurotic patients.

Predicted that borderline patients would report a more pervasive experience of aloneness than would neurotic patients in a study of 20 outpatients with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and 20 outpatients with neurotic or higher level character pathology. All Ss were aged 18–60 yrs. Measures included the Rorschach, an early memories test, and a modified version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Borderline Ss demonstrated a developmentally lower capacity for object representation and evocative memory of affective object relationships, fewer positively toned representations, and a more pervasive experience of aloneness than Ss with neurotic character pathology. The experience of aloneness was the strongest clinical predictor of diagnosis, supporting the contention that inner emptiness or aloneness may be central to these Ss' subjective experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Increased semantic and repetition priming in schizophrenic patients.

Positive and negative priming (PP and NP) in schizophrenia were studied with a lexical-decision task. Probe words, presented 800 ms after the response to the prime (containing a word and a nonword), were either identical to, semantically related to, or unrelated to the prime target word (PP) or to the prime distractor word (NP). Schizophrenic patients displayed stronger semantic and repetition PP than controls after controlling for their slower responses. Significant NP was observed in both groups for word repetition only. The PP findings contrast with results from studies with similar prime-probe intervals but without prime responses. It is proposed that schizophrenic patients, because of impaired (controlled) processes of response selection, strongly benefit from (or rely on) the automatic retrieval of processing episodes containing response information. Related findings indicating automatic response facilitation in schizophrenia are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Application of electromyographic biofeedback to the relaxation training of schizophrenic, neurotic, and tension headache patients.

Examined the effects of EMG biofeedback on tension reduction by schizophrenic, neurotic, and tension headache patients. 14 patients (mean age 39 yrs) participated voluntarily in at least 10 weekly EMG biofeedback sessions at a public outpatient clinic. All had complained of chronic tension. Ss showed significant decreases in their muscle tension levels with successive biofeedback training sessions. No significant differences were found between the schizophrenic, neurotic, and tension headache groups. A further contribution is the finding that patients with diverse socioeconomic and educational levels benefited similarly from EMG biofeedback training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dimensions of internalized object relations in borderline and schizophrenic patients.

This paper explores two dimensions of internalized object relations in borderline and schizophrenic patients using Rorschach scales. A thematic and a structural Rorschach measure of object relations is applied to the Rorschachs of two borderline groups (an infantile personality group and an obsessive-paranoid group) and a schizophrenic group. The findings suggest the value of both a multidimensional definition of internalized object relations and the use of such an approach to clarifying the diagnostic concept of borderline personality disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The risk for psychiatric disorders in relatives of schizophrenic and control probands: a comparison of three independent studies

BACKGROUND: Although replication is the heart of science, psychiatric geneticists rarely have the opportunity to replicate findings, especially more than once. METHODS: This article reviews results from three independent family studies of schizophrenia on which one of us conducted diagnostic reviews: the Danish Adoption Study (DAS), the Iowa 500 non-500 family study (IFS), and the Roscommon Family Study (RFS). We utilized DSM-III or DSM-III-R criteria and meta-analysis techniques. RESULTS: The odds ratios (OR) in personally interviewed, first degree biological relatives of schizophrenic and matched control probands for schizophrenia, other non-affective psychoses (ONAP), schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), unipolar affective illness (UPAI), bipolar affective illness (BPAI), and anxiety disorders were homogeneous across studies. For alcoholism, ORs were significantly heterogeneous. Schizophrenia, SPD and ONAP strongly aggregated in relatives of schizophrenic probands with decreasing common OR estimates of 16.2, 5.0 and 4.0, respectively. The common OR for anxiety disorders was 1.1, indicating no familial co-aggregation. For UPAI and BPAI, the common ORs exceeded unity (1.3 and 1.9, respectively), although only the former was statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Schizophrenia strongly aggregates in families and shares familial factors with SPD and ONAP but not anxiety disorders. The familial factors of aetiological importance for schizophrenia and affective illness may be weakly related. With the exception of alcoholism, the patterns of psychiatric disorders in relatives of schizophrenic and control probands in these three studies were sufficiently similar that, despite their methodological differences, they can probably be viewed as replications of one another.     

Multivariate structure of associations between verbal and nonverbal intelligence among brain-damaged, schizophrenic, neurotic, and alcoholic patients.

The scores of 380 male Ss—brain-damaged, process schizophrenic, reactive schizophrenic, neurotic, and alcoholic patients—on the Verbal and Performance subtests of the WAIS were subjected to canonical correlational and multiple discriminant analyses. Substantial associations between verbal and nonverbal abilities were found for all groups, although these correlations were sufficiently imperfect that each set of subtests contributed independently to group discrimination when combined with the other set. Results support C. Spearman's (1927) view that measures of intelligence contain both general and specific components of variance and not the high degree of differentiation that is sometimes postulated. It is concluded that major forms of psychopathology are characterized more by differences in intellectual profile patterns than by changes in the basic organization of abilities. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing phonological and semantic ambiguity: Evidence from semantic priming at different SOAs.

Disambiguation of heterophonic and homophonic homographs was investigated in Hebrew using semantic priming. Ambiguous primes were followed by unambiguous targets at 100 msec, 250 msec, and 750 msec stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Lexical decision for targets related to the dominant phonological alternatives of heterophonic homographs was facilitated at all SOAs. Targets related to subordinate alternatives were facilitated only at SOAs of 250 msec or longer. When the primes were homophonic homographs, semantic relationship facilitated lexical decision to targets at all SOAs regardless of the dominance of the meaning to which the targets were related. These data can be accounted for by assuming multiple lexical entries for heterophonic homographs, single lexical entries for homophonic homographs, and phonological mediation of accessing meanings. Language-specific factors probably account for the long-lasting activation of subordinate meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic and semantic processing in schizophrenic patients evaluated by lexical-decision tasks.

Two lexical-decision tasks with 500-ms stimulus-onset asynchrony were conducted with 34 schizophrenic patients. This group consisted of 24 schizophrenic patients with thought disorder (TD) and 10 schizophrenic patients without thought disorder (NTD), 14 psychiatric controls (depressive illness), 20 hospitalized controls, and 20 normal controls. One lexical-decision task with semantic relations (related vs. unrelated, Experiment 1) and 1 task with syntactic relations (congruent vs. incongruent; Experiment 2) were used to evaluate processing of different lexical information. In Experiment 1, although all control groups and NTD schizophrenic patients showed semantic priming, TD schizophrenic patients did not. In Experiment 2, all groups showed a significant syntactic effect. These findings provide evidence for an abnormality in semantic processing and the preservation of syntactic processing in TD schizophrenic patients, thus suggesting a deficit in the processing of semantic information under certain conditions when compared with normal syntactic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concept of "pathogenesis" in parents of schizophrenic and normal children.

Administered the TAT to 5 pairs of parents of normal and schizophrenic children in a cross-validation study. Parents by diagnostic category were matched on age, education, and social class. Each story was judged pathogenic, benign, or unscorable and a pathogenic score was tabulated for each S from the formula: pathogenic/pathogenic plus benign. Mothers of the normal children told significantly fewer pathogenic stories than mothers of the schizophrenic children. Although fathers did not differ significantly, their mean pathogenic scores were distributed according to the hypotheses of the study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Duction ranges in normal probands and patients with Graves'' ophthalmopathy, determined using the Goldmann perimeter

University students (111, both male and female) were screened for red-green color deficiency using projected 35 mm slides reproduced from Ishihara and H-R-R color plates. Ishihara and H-R-R color plates were tested in the same individuals at a second setting and the responses compared: 6.3% of the students were identified as color deficient by the Ishihara and 80.2% by the H-R-R projected slides while 5.4% were designated color blind by the Ishihara plates and 4.5% by the H-R-R plates. The sensitivity of both screening systems was 100%; the specificity of the Ishihara slides was 98.1% compared to only 20.8% for the H-R-R. The 9.8% prevalence of red-green deficiency detected by the Ishihara plates and 8.2% by the H-R-R plates for males is similar to the 6 to 9% frequency found for Caucasian males in other population studies. Within rigid guidelines, projected color slides have potential usefulness as a screening method for detecting individuals with red-green color deficiencies.     

Mediation and associative facilitation in neurotic, psychotic, and normal subjects.

The present investigation is a replication of previous work (see 30: 555; 27: 4925) utilizing Veterans Administration medical and psychiatric patients instead of college Ss. The previous findings indicated that associative relationship facilitates verbal learning. Ss learned 2 sets of syllable-word paired associates; ? of the pairs on the 2nd list had response terms which were associates of their responses to words on the 1st list. Although the responses of all Ss showed the effects of associative facilitation, this was more true for nonpsychotics. The results are discussed in terms of understanding the thinking of schizophrenics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Manifest" anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and the rate of conditioning.

"The validity of the Taylor Scale of Manifest Anxiety was examined with a view to reconciling the contradictory results of the studies of the relation between anxiety and the rate of conditioning… . The results indicated that different scores on the scale do not represent different degrees of manifest anxiety, though the scores within a limited range (19 to 33) are more likely to be associated with a clinical diagnosis of "anxious" than are scores above and below this range." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioning and personality: A study of normal and neurotic subjects.

"Pavlov's concepts of excitation and inhibition were related to the dimension of introversion-extraversion in normal and neurotic subjects. Normal and neurotic subjects were conditioned, using the eyeblink and PGR reflexes. It was found that (a) anxiety states conditioned much better than hysterics, and (b) conditionability is related to introversion-extraversion and not to neuroticism." 37 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality characteristics of parents of neurotic, aggressive, and normal preadolescent boys.

Compared MMPI's of parents of neurotic, aggressive, and normal 9-11 yr. old boys using 2 of Achenbach's factors for classification of child psychiatric patients. 23 couples, parents of aggressive boys, were more deviant than 29 couples, parents of neurotic boys, Experimental parents were more deviant than 50 control couples. Fathers of aggressive boys were higher on Pd than either fathers of neurotic or control boys. Fathers of neurotic boys were higher on K. Mothers of aggressive boys had more low point Mf. More neurotic boys were oldest and more aggressive boys middle children. (16 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)