Word association repertoires of schizophrenics and normals.

The work association repertoires of 3 association responses of 20 poor and 20 good premorbid nonparanoid schizophrenics were not more deviant than those of 20 normals. There was significantly greater commonality in the 1st association response than in the 2nd response which, in turn, showed greater commonality than the 3rd response. These results suggest that schizophrenic language disorders are not due to overall language deficiency and partially support the disturbance viewpoint. A 3rd viewpoint is proposed, based on a 2-stage process involving nondeviant associations with inadequate cognitive controls as differentiating schizophrenics from normals. The hierarchical order for frequency given by the Russell-Jenkins norms obtains for both discrete and extended word association responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal paired-associates learning in chronic schizophrenics as a function of positive and negative evaluation.

Seventy-two chronic schizophrenics (36 regressed and 36 partially remitted) and 36 normals were given paired associates of 2 levels of association strength and 2 levels of intralist response competition to learn under positive, negative, and nonevaluation conditions. Regressed schizophrenics showed maximum decrement on low-association word pairs following positive evaluation. This was especially true for those Ss with low self-esteem. These findings suggest that heightened arousal resulting from dissonance between a negative self-image and positive evaluation of performance can lead to behavioral decrement in a difficult task requiring novel associations, such decrement being congruent with the Hull-Spence behavior theory and the Yerkes-Dodson hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparisons of the restricted association of chronic schizophrenic and normal control subjects.

Obtained 11 types of restricted associations and free associations from 24 chronic schizophrenics and 24 normal controls equated for age and education. The associations of schizophrenics were more variable than those of normal Ss, especially on tasks which most restricted the choice of responses. Agreement in responding between normal and schizophrenic Ss was markedly lower when compared with that between high- and low-creative Ss, or with 1-yr, test-retest data. Repetition of responses given to the same stimuli under different instructions was markedly higher for schizophrenic than normal Ss, and thus the degree of task and response differentiation was reduced. The restricted associations overlapped with free associations more markedly for schizophrenic than for normal Ss, but the general structure of a conceptual semantic space was about the same for both groups. It is argued that when explicit constraint in tasks of verbal associations is high, schizophrenic Ss, more than normals, impose a low degree of implicit constraint on their verbal behavior; when the external constraint is low, they increase their implicit constraint. (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Style of adaptation to perceived aversive material control and internal scanning behavior.

Tested the proposal that comparability in life-styles exists between normal college males who have adopted closed and open styles of coping with aversive maternal control (i.e., perceived high control, low nurturance) and the life-styles of process and reactive schizophrenics. Breadth of internal scanning behavior, defined in terms of the availability of alternate word meanings, was studied with the expectation that closed-style males would be broader internal scanners in keeping with the adaptive-style model and with the limited evidence on process-reactive schizophrenics. 56 white male undergraduates completed the Parental Attitude Research Instrument, A. Heilbrun's parent-child interaction rating scales, A. Willner's unusual meanings vocabulary test, and the Stroop Color-Word Test. Closed-style males were superior to open-style males on a test of nondominant word namings and also provided more remote free word associations. No differences were found on a word-meaning test not requiring extended meanings. (24 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Proverb word counts as a measure of overinclusiveness in delusional schizophrenics.

A partial replication was conducted of Payne's (1964) report concerning the relationship between delusions and overinclusive thinking as measured by proverbs word counts. Word counts were made of Gorham Proverbs Test responses given by age and intelligence-matched groups of 21 delusional schizophrenics, 21 nondelusional schizophrenics, and 21 nonschizophrenic, nondelusional psychiatric in-patients. 23 paranoid, 23 nonparanoid, and 23 nonschizophrenic control Ss, similarly matched, from the same population, were also compared. No significant differences in proverb word counts were found among the groups. Although the possibility of increased irrelevant side remarks could not be excluded, paranoid or delusional schizophrenics do not produce higher proverb relevant word counts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intrusion of schizophrenics' idiosyncratic associations into their conceptual performance.

Instructed 19 schizophrenic and 7 nonschizophrenic inpatients to give 10 associations which were "names of things" to each of 3 stimulus words which were category names (e.g., fruit). After approximately 2 wk. without medications, Ss performed a concept identification task which involved signaling whether or not names of specific items belonged to a given category. Names to be identified included instances of the category (e.g., apple), similar things (e.g., carrot), and dissimilar things (e.g., football). Also included were idiosyncratic associations given by S to the category word and idiosyncratic associations given by a different S. Schizophrenics produced significantly more idiosyncratic associations than nonschizophrenics on the initial association test. On the conceptual task, schizophrenics significantly more often identified their own idiosyncratic associations to the category names as instances of the category than they did for idiosyncratic associations from another patient. It is suggested that at least some idiosyncratic intrusions in the conceptual performance of schizophrenics consist of preexisting associations, as predicted by response interference theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychophysiological correlates of responsiveness in schizophrenia.

Measured responsiveness under stress through music preferences for 11 male and 9 female schizophrenics receiving no antipsychotic medication. These Ss were compared with a control group of 7 male and 13 female hospital staff or volunteers. Results indicate that higher schizophrenic responsiveness was related to lower skin conductance, fewer body movements, greater diastolic blood pressure decrease, better word recall, and shorter periods of institutionalization. Normal controls did not differ significantly in music preferences but were lower in all physiological measures. The finding that sweat gland activity, muscle tension, and diastolic blood pressure changes were related to stress in these acute schizophrenics paralleled the findings of A. F. Ax, et al (1969) with chronic schizophrenics. The interpretation that responsiveness is related to ability to cope with stress in schizophrenia is supported by results of the current study. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal conditioning of common associations in long-term schizophrenics: A failure.

L. Ullmann, L. Krasner, and R. Edinger have stated that "common associations by schizophrenics to word association stimuli may be brought under control by selective reinforcement." An attempt was made to replicate and extend this study using 60 male schizophrenics. The results suggest that social reinforcement of common associations by chronic schizophrenics fails to produce any evidence of a generalized increase in the tendency to given common associations. The results of the L. Ullmann study may be seen as the result of a statistical artifact regression to a common mean. Inappropriate use of the analysis of covariance to treat data of this type is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex differences and institutionalization in the word associations of schizophrenics.

Studied word associations of 20 male and 20 female schizophrenics. Although no significant differences in pathological responses were associated with sex or institutionalization, differences associated with both were found in healthy responses. Females gave more logical coordinate associations (p     

Self-editing deficits in schizophrenia: A word-association analogue.

Made contrasting predictions to differentiate a 1- from a 2-stage model of word-association performance in schizophrenia. 24 schizophrenics and 24 normals provided word associations in response to (a) "free" vs. "idiosyncratic" instructions, and (b) stimulus words that typically elicit either a strong dominant or several weak associations. Results confirm the 2-stage model: under idiosyncratic instructions, schizophrenics produced more common associations than normals. Findings were consistent with 2 assumptions pertinent to the 2-stage model: schizophrenics (a) sample from an underlying repertoire of nondeviant associations; and (b) are deficient in the ability to edit out sampled but situationally inappropriate associations, whether common or unusual. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autonomic functioning in process and reactive schizophrenia.

Compared the autonomic functioning of male process schizophrenics, reactive schizophrenics, and normal ss (n = 30) under rest and arousal conditions. Ss were exposed to 6 arousal conditions: (a) white noise, (b) electric shock, (c) paired associate learning, (d) word activity test, (e) finger dexterity task, and (f) pursuit rotor task. Rest periods preceded each arousal condition. Heart rate, skin resistance, respiration rate, diastolic and systolic blood pressures were recorded under all 6 conditions. Results show that under stress the levels of physiological functioning for normal ss and reactive schizophrenics were similar on skin resistance and blood pressure, with process schizophrenics showing a higher level of arousal on skin resistance and a lower level on blood pressure. Reactive schizophrenics had the fastest heart rate, with process schizophrenics next, and normals the lowest. Respiration did not reliably differentiate among the groups. Reactive schizophrenics and normals generally showed greater increments to the arousal conditions (compared with prestress base lines) than the process schizophrenics in all measures except heart rate and skin resistance. In those 2 measures, reactive and process schizophrenics were similar in their reactions to the stress conditons, and both groups showed less reactivity in general than normals. (french summary) (31 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal interactions with individuals presenting with and without physical disability.

Examined actual language behavior directed toward individuals with and without apparent disabilities in a standardized but naturalistic setting. Four experimenters (2 male and 2 female) requested directions to the bookstore from a total of 160 college students on a university campus. Each experimenter portrayed a student with a disability using a wheelchair and a student without a disability. Conversations were surreptitiously recorded, and verbal interaction patterns were analyzed. Significant differences were observed on all dependent variables, word counts, frequency of interrogatives, and use of locator words. Findings suggest that individuals with a disability are addressed differently than those without disabilities, and provide limited behavioral replication of research documenting differential responses of college students to persons with and without disabilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of linguistic ideas in schizophrenics.

S. D. Koh and R. A. Peterson (1978) found that requiring semantic encoding at acquisition facilitated recall for schizophrenics in the same way that it does for normals. It was hypothesized that more complex forms of semantic organization would reveal a deficit in schizophrenics, but not for all subtypes. The paradigm used, developed by J. D. Bransford and J. J. Franks (1971), involves an incidental sentence recognition task in which Ss are presented interrelated parts of a complex idea in acquisition and subsequently tested for their memory of new and old (previously seen) instances of the idea. In the present study, with 56 hospitalized male veterans and 14 college students, normals' and nonpsychotics' patterns of recognition responses reflected the organization of this complex idea, even when they had actually never seen the specific test sentences. All schizophrenics were found to be capable of distinguishing sentences that violated the relations within the complex ideas from those that did not, but only the good premorbid acute patients' responses reflected the integration of part ideas. Poor premorbid acute patients showed an intermediate level of integrating semantic information, and chronic patients were unable to use the interrelations within ideas to organize their memories. (1? p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship between formal thought disorder and retardation in schizophrenia.

17 schizophrenics admitted into the hospital less than 6 mo before were compared on Bannister's Grid Test of Schizophrenic Thought Disorder with 19 schizophrenics admitted over 6 mo before and with a group of 17 nonschizophrenic, psychiatric controls under 3 conditions: fast rate of responding, slow rate of responding, and in-between rate of responding. It was predicted that the schizophrenics would show more thought disorder under fast than slow conditions and that the recently admitted schizophrenics would be more thought disordered than the earlier admitted schizophrenics. Contrary to expectations, the patients tended to show less thought disorder on the test when their responses were speeded than when they were encouraged to take their time. Moreover, the earlier admitted schizophrenics showed more thought disorder than the recently admitted schizophrenics under all 3 conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Avoidance conditioning of verbal behavior without awareness: A paradigm of repression.

31 male college students responded to a 15-item word association list receiving an electric shock immediately after 5 arbitrarily selected response words. A number of additional trials were given with shock administered every time as S responded with one of the 5 first-trial punished responses. They were then asked to chain-associate to each of the stimulus words with no shock administered. At the conclusion of the experiment Ss could be classified into insight and non-insight groups on the basis of their levels of verbal awareness as to the reasons for the shocks and what they had done to avoid them. Both groups showed a rapid and marked learning of avoidance behavior and a significant decrement in the number of punished responses occurring during chained associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time estimation in process-reactive schizophrenia.

Process and reactive schizophrenics, and reactive schizophrenics and normals were compared as to their responses on a perceptual time-estimation task. Null hypotheses being tested were that groups would not differ in variability or accuracy of response. Schizophrenic (45) and normal (15) subjects were selected from the male patient population and hospital employees, respectively, of a Veteran's Administration hospital. Schizophrenics selected for the study were classified by means of the Abbreviated Becker Elgin Scale. Subjects were individually administered a time-estimation task consisting of seven stimulus cards which were tachistoscopically presented, with exposure speeds at 10, 20, and 30 seconds for each card. Judgments of exposure times were converted into scores based upon ratios of estimated time to actual time. Scores (three) for each card were totaled. Groups were then compared on each of the stimulus cards by means of two-tailed t tests. In accuracy of estimation, process schizophrenics demonstrated significantly less accuracy than did reactives on four of the seven cards; no differences were shown between reactives and normals in accuracy of estimation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual pattern integration in psychiatric patients.

Tested 32 psychiatric inpatients (approximate mean age 23 yrs) with a modification of C. Eriksen and J. Collins's visual pattern integration test (1967). Ss were divided into schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic groups and were compared with 20 hospital staff and 20 college students. The visual pattern integration functions of schizophrenics were found to be different from those of college students, but no other group differences were found. Among the inpatients, no correlations were found between visual pattern integration and premorbid adjustment, symptomatology, or various clinical/demographic factors. The one group difference appears to be the result of variables such as age and task motivation. It is concluded that icon-processing abnormalities, as represented by visual pattern integration deficits, cannot account for posticonic abnormalities found in schizophrenics. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of instructional set and need for social approval on commonality of word association responses.

This study investigated the effect of various instructional sets (speed, relaxed time instructions, and "set popular" instructions) on commonality of word associations. Findings were generally supportive of the hypotheses: significantly more common associations were given under speed as compared to relaxed instructions, Ss were able to significantly increase their commonality scores under a set to give popular responses, and need for social approval was differentially related to commonality under relaxed but not under speed instructions. Contrary to a suggestion of Jenkins, social sensitivity (as reflected in the need for approval measure) was not related to the ability to increase one's commonality score under "set popular" instructions. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A prediction of patterns of schizophrenic error resulting from semantic generalization.

Conducted a study with 2 groups of 26 male schizophrenics and normal psychiatric aides (mean age = 45 yr) to test predictions derived from a theory of disordered thought by L. J. Chapman, J. P. Chapman, and G. A. Miller (see PA, Vol. 39:10059) concerning the conditions under which schizophrenic Ss exhibit excessive generalization errors. The theory assumes that both the schizophrenic and normal are biased toward responding to words in terms of the words' strongest aspects of meaning, but that schizophrenics are more strongly biased toward this than are normals. Ss were instructed to indicate by pressing buttons marked "yes" and "no" whether or not test words presented in serial fashion on a memory drum had appeared on a previous training list. "Yes" responses to test words not appearing on a previous training list were the measures of generalization errors. The predictions were supported by the finding that schizophrenics made significantly more errors to words on the test list that shared strong meaning responses (p