Previous research on the nature of person perception in depression has been inconclusive. This investigation differs from earlier studies in that extensive free-response descriptions of other people and self were collected from patients with major depression and from nonpsychiatric control Ss. In comparison with control Ss, depressed patients described fewer positive aspects not only of self but also of parents and significant others and reported more negative aspects of these people. Cluster analysis (HICLAS) also showed that more cognitive differentiation of negative self-perceptions (negative self-complexity) was characteristic of clinical depression. In both control Ss and patients, a positive (or negative) view of self was highly correlated (.85 or more) with a positive (or negative) view of parents and significant others. These correlations were significantly stronger than those between self and less important others.

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A stochastic theory is presented to: (1) account for a speaker's selection of a linguistic response to distinguish a referent stimulus from nonreferent stimuli, and (2) predict the probability that a listener, using the speaker's response, correctly identifies the referent. The speaker's response is postulated to result from the concatenation of 2 hypothetical psychological stages, termed "sampling" and "comparison." The listener's identification of the referent is postulated to result from a 1-stage process similar to that of the speaker's comparison stage. Results from several interrelated experiments are reported which provide support for the basic assumptions of the theory. Psychological processes inherent in classical word association and in recognition and recall are interpreted in terms of the speaker and listener theory. (37 ref.)

To test several alternative models of verbal communication in schizophrenia, 24 schizophrenic and 24 normal speakers were shown sets of colors varying in similarity and number of colors displayed. The task was to describe a designated color in each set so that a listener could pick it out. Disturbances in schizophrenic speakers were shown to occur whenever the task demanded that they edit out nondiscriminating descriptions. Thus, for highly dissimilar sets where the self-editing demands are minimal, the communication accuracy, reaction time, and utterance length of schizophrenics and normals were indistinguishable. But with increasing intraset similarity the schizophrenics' communication accuracy dropped below the normals, while their reaction time and utterance length rose more sharply. Qualitative and quantitative features of disturbed schizophrenic communication were described in terms of a perseverative-chaining model of speaker behavior in schizophrenia.Schizophrenic speech is typically competent when viewed from a phonological or a syntactical standpoint; yet listeners often find the patient's referents frustratingly elusive: "He seems to be speaking ordinary English, but I can't tell what in the world he's driving at." Cohen and Camhi (1967) reported an experiment in which referent communication by normal speakers and listeners was compared with that of schizophrenic patients. The schizophrenics were found to be deficient as speakers but comparable to normals as listeners. The findings were interpreted as evidence of a deficit, not in the repertoire of referent-response associations or meanings from which speakers select their utterances but rather in a selfediting function (Rosenberg & Cohen, 1966) that screens out the less effective referent descriptions in the speaker's repertoire before they are emitted.

This study used a set-theoretical model to construct self-perception structures and person-perception structures for 10 recently hospitalized schizophrenic patients, 10 nonschizophrenic patients recently hospitalized for depression, and 10 nonpsychiatric subjects. Overall self-perception structures were significantly less elaborated in the schizophrenic patients when compared with either the psychiatric or the nonpsychiatric comparison group. No comparable differences were found for measures taken from the person-perception structures. The degree of elaboration of self in the particular context of self as psychiatric patient was found to be correlated (r = .74, p less than .01) with Global Assessment Scale ratings of current functional level in the schizophrenic group.