Stability of formal thought disorder and referential communication disturbances in schizophrenia.

This study examined the degree to which different types of communication disturbances in the speech of 48 schizophrenia patients and 28 controls were variable and state related versus stable and traitlike. Clinically rated formal thought disorder and 5 types of referential disturbance showed substantial stability within participants over time. The sixth type of referential disturbance, the vague reference, was not stable over time. Formal thought disorder was associated with the severity of core psychotic symptoms in patients, whereas referential disturbances showed little or no association with positive or negative symptom severity. Furthermore, changes in psychotic symptoms over time were accompanied by corresponding changes in formal thought disorder but not referential disturbances. These results support the idea that some types of referential disturbances are traitlike and may be reflective of vulnerability as well as manifest illness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Formal thought disorder in schizophrenics and their twins.

Measured thought disorder in the co-twins of schizophrenic twins in 17 pairs of identical twins, 14 pairs of fraternal same-sex twins, and 12 unpaired twins. Ss were administered a modified version of the Scale for the Assessment of Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders. No evidence of genetic influence on thought disorder was found. A factor analysis of the thought disorder scales revealed 2 interpretable factors reflecting verbosity and discontinuities in the form of speech. Scales with high loadings on the verbosity factor showed signs of familial influence and were significantly correlated with severity of psychiatric history. Scales with high loadings on the discontinuity factor were associated with the florid psychotic phase of illness. (36 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)     

Cognitive impairments associated with formal thought disorder in people with schizophrenia.

Formal thought disorder (FTD), or disorganized speech, is one of the central signs of schizophrenia. Despite extensive research, the cognitive processes associated with FTD are still unclear. However, the authors' review of FTD theories and research indicates that considerable progress has been made in identifying possible cognitive impairments associated with FTD. Specifically, FTD is strongly associated with impaired executive functioning and with impaired processing of semantic information. Their review indicates that previous research has not yet supported an association between FTD and either an increase in spreading activation or an impairment within the language production system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical cohesion and formal thought disorder during and after psychotic episodes.

Compared speech samples obtained from 10 schizophrenics (mean age 28 yrs), 11 manics (mean age 26.2 yrs), 11 schizoaffectives (mean age 25.8 yrs), and 10 normals (mean age 33.6 yrs) for the amount of lexical cohesion both within and between clauses. Two speech samples were obtained for each patient: one shortly after admission to a psychiatric hospital and another several weeks following discharge. All psychiatric patients showed evidence of formal thought disorder at admission, and all 3 groups showed a significant decline in the extent of thought disorder at follow-up. There were no differences between groups with regard to between-clause lexical cohesion at either point in time. Within-clause lexical cohesion did distinguish among the psychiatric groups at the 1st assessment interval; schizophrenics showed less within-clause lexical cohesion than the manics or schizoaffective patients. The manics and the schizoaffectives showed a significant decline in the amount of within-clause lexical cohesion from initial assessment to follow-up. The schizophrenics exhibited a modest decline in the amount of between-clause lexical cohesion. Results indicate that diagnostic differences in lexical cohesion depended on the specificity of the measure and suggest that there are subtle differences between the forms of verbal-communication impairment observed in schizophrenic and affective disorders. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between formal thought disorder and executive functioning component processes.

In 2 studies, associations between formal thought disorder (FTD) and 2 components of executive functioning, processing of context and interference resolution, were investigated. One study, involving people with schizophrenia, examined associations between performance on processing of context (N-back) and interference resolution (interference in Steinberg probe recognition) tasks and FTD. The second study, involving nonpsychiatric participants, was an analogue study that examined the effects of simulated processing of context (performance of 1-back with distraction) and interference resolution (telling new stories about previously seen pictures) deficits on FTD in a speech production task. In both studies, processing of context deficits predicted FTD. Moreover, in both studies, the effect of processing of context deficits on FTD was especially pronounced when combined with interference resolution deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relation of moral judgment development to formal education.

Tested Ss from an ongoing longitudinal study initiated by the present 1st author and colleagues (see record 1974-32073-001) at 2-yr intervals after high school graduation on the Defining Issues Test and other measures of moral thinking (e.g., socio-moral concepts test, political attitudes test) to investigate the relationship of moral-judgment development to formal education. In a 3rd testing 4 yrs after high school, 59 Ss participated; of these, 39 were in a 4th testing 6 yrs later. When Ss were divided into low- and high-education groups, depending on how many years of college they attended, the groups showed increasingly divergent developmental pathways. The high-education group showed increasing gains, and the low-education group showed a leveling off. Years in college added significantly to the predictability of moral judgment in young adulthood, above and beyond that accounted for by initial high school scores on the same moral-judgment measures. Results complement and extend findings from other cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the relation of formal education to moral judgment. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reference performance and positive and negative thought disorder: A follow-up study of manics and schizophrenics.

Manic (n?=?22) and schizophrenic (n?=?28) patients were examined with clinical and linguistic measures of language performance at an acute admission and at a follow-up. It was found that the frequency of incompetent references and the severity of negative thought disorder were stable independent traits of schizophrenics. Furthermore, low levels of verbal productivity, indexed both clinically and linguistically, predicted the likelihood that schizophrenic subjects would be psychotic at follow-up. The language performance of manic patients was not temporally stable, although high levels of reference failures at index predicted psychosis at follow-up. These results are evaluated in terms of their implications for differentiating state-specific aspects of speech competence from potential vulnerability markers in these two types of patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A preliminary investigation of covert communication of expectancies to schizophrenics.

6hospital attendants, classified as either A or B on the Whitehorn-Betz AB Scale, administered the Rosenthal picture-rating task to 8 schizophrenics classified as either high- or low-social-competence types. Expectancies were established so that attendants would inadvertently bias their patients. The A's tended to bias low-social-competence schizophrenics more than B's and B's tended to bias high-social-competence schizophrenics more than A's. An analysis of ratings of voice quality indicated that a "social control" construct mediated the interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concurrent and predictive validity of thought disorder and affectivity: A 22-year follow-up of acute schizophrenics.

Followed-up 51 male patients with hospital diagnoses of schizophrenia in the military service through VA hospital records 20 yrs after their initial service hospitalization. Results reveal that severity of thought disorder did not predict outcome, but measures of affectivity and interpersonal competence did so with high significance. The question of why affectivity has received so little attention in the research literature is addressed. It is suggested that recent research diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia are inadequate, because the criteria focus almost exclusively on the less predictive symptoms of disordered thought and exclude assessment of affectivity and interpersonal competence. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Left-handedness and thought disorder in the schizophrenias.

The relation between language dysfunction and handedness was examined in a sample of 58 male schizophrenic patients. Severity and type of language dysfunction were assessed using ratings on categories of thought disorder derived from the Schedule of Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (Spitzer & Endicott, 1977). Hand preferred for writing was the criterion for handedness. In this sample, the incidence of left-handedness was raised and left-handedness was associated with the presence and severity of thought disorder. These findings are congruent with the hypothesis that a sizable proportion of left-handed schizophrenic individuals are left-handed because of a disruption in the pattern of hemispheric dominance that also impairs language functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Level of formal thought and organizational memory strategies.

Identified 28 9th graders of similar intelligence as being in either early or late formal-operational stages and presented them with tasks to assess their use of organizational memory strategies: multitrial free recall of unrelated and categorized words and a sorting task followed by free recall of the sorted words. In the multitrial free-recall tasks, late formal-operational adolescents generally showed greater amounts of recall organization than did early formal-operational adolescents. When storage organization was induced through sorting, however, the 2 groups showed equivalent recall organization. Across tasks, late formal-operational adolescents' recall exceeded that of early formal-operational adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expressed emotion and communication deviance in the families of schizophrenics.

Investigated the relation between 2 measures of family communication, intrafamilial expressed emotion (EE) and communication deviance (CD). Ss were 205 relatives of recently episodic schizophrenics from 3 samples collected in the US and the UK. Ss were rated according to their participation in a family interview. Findings indicate that high-EE relatives had higher levels of CD than did low-EE relatives in all 3 samples. When high-EE relatives were subdivided according to the specific EE attitude they manifested (i.e., criticism and/or emotional overinvolvement), those relatives showing emotionally overinvolved attitudes exhibited the highest levels of CD and were consistently separable from low-EE relatives on the CD measure. The potential impact that high-EE/high-CD environments may have on schizophrenic patients is discussed. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract thinking deficit and autism in process and reactive schizophrenics.

Evaluated the influence of inability to abstract and autism on the proverbs interpretations of process and reactive schizophrenics. 48 reactive schizophrenics, 48 process schizophrenics, and 24 normals were scored for abstract level and autism on D. R. Gorham's (see record 1957-01037-001) proverbs test. Compared to normals, both schizophrenic groups were abnormal on each measure, both before and after the groups were matched for vocabulary. However, process schizophrenics were more deficient on abstract level than reactives. There was no significant difference between the mean autism scores of the two schizophrenic groups until the effects of abstract level were removed. Then it was seen that autism was more prominent among reactives than process Ss. Studied independently of one another, loss of abstract ability characterized process schizophrenics, while autism was more typical of reactives. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in formal thought: Role of expectations and aptitudes.

The present investigation of individual differences in formal reasoning focused on expectation-based rules governing formal reasoning performance and the relationship between aptitudes considered important in formal reasoning and formal-reasoning performance. 60 17-yr-old high school seniors received a battery of group and individual aptitude measures and formal-reasoning tests. Results reveal the effect of expectation-based rules on formal-reasoning performance. The aptitude measures overlapped substantially with formal reasoning, although 12% of the formal-reasoning variance was unique. A newly defined aspect of field dependence–independence, that is, familiar field, related to formal reasoning and clarified individual differences in formal reasoning. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language production and thought disorder in schizophrenia.

The authors examined the relationship between language production (LP) processes and thought disorder. Thirty-nine schizophrenic or schizoaffective participants completed tasks measuring discourse planning, monitoring, and grammatical–phonological encoding, as well as an interview used to rate thought disorder. The authors found that different LP processes were differentially related to different thought disorder subtypes. Incompetent references were strongly and selectively related to discourse planning performance. In addition, word approximations–neologisms were strongly and specifically associated with grammatical–phonological encoding performance. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for understanding the multifaceted nature and etiology of thought disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive thought disorder in a hypothetically psychosis-prone population.

Proverb interpretations of subjects who scored high on the Perceptual Aberration-Magical Ideation Scale (Per-Mags) (Chapman & Chapman, 1985) were compared with those of low-scoring controls. Responses to 10 familiar and 3 unfamiliar proverbs were scored for Bizarre-idiosyncratic thinking (J. Marengo et al; see record 1987-30079-001) and literalness (C. A. Hertler et al; see record 1979-12346-001). A Group by Type of Proverb (familiar versus unfamiliar) interaction was found for bizarre-idiosyncratic scores; Per-Mags scored higher than controls on unfamiliar, but not familiar proverbs. The Group?×?Familiarity interaction for bizarre-idiosyncratic scores indicates that the Per-Mag group displayed a subclinical, positive-thought disorder that is affected by the familiarity of the proverbs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)