The 50 words appearing most frequently in psychological reports were investigated in terms of semantic difficulties. A quantitative analysis of definitions indicated that psychologists were more verbose and circuitous than psychiatrists whether the content of the term was psychological, psychiatric, or psychoanalytical. Wide variations occurred. "Viewed qualitatively, the psychologists' definitions were more abstract, more highly conceptualized, more academic and technical." One of the most striking findings was the looseness and ambiguity of many of the definitions.
PROBLEMThe major purpose of this investigation was to determine whether chronic schizophrenic patients are deviant with respect to (a) ability to derive bipolar conceptual dimensions in terms of which sets of concrete materials (such as geometric forms or photographs of facial expressions) may be meaningfully arranged in rank order; (b) ability to rank these sets of materials in terms of a dimension of meaning after the bipolar concepts have been made explicit and anchor points have been provided; (c) their relative ability to perform tasks involving materials depicting the expression of human emotions vs. tasks involving geometric figures; (d) their admission of subjective disturbance for various photographed facial expressions; and (e) their preference for geometric forms vs. photographed expressions as task materials. A secondary purpose was to determine whether the ability of schizophrenic patients to derive conceptual dimensions from sets of concrete materials and to arrange these materials along conceptual dimensions (once these were specified) is related to estimated premorbid level of general intelligence, to current level of intellectual impairment, or to type of schizophrenic reaction.
METHOD
Subjects.Twenty-four patients were selected from a ward of the Brentwood VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital. Each had a staff psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia of at least two years duration. These patients ranged in age from 27 to 49 years (median, 41) and had been hospitalized from two to fourteen years (median, 4). The clinical records of only two patients showed evidence of neurological abnormality. In both instances, prefrontal lobotomy had been performed at least five years prior to the experiment. The vocabulary ages of the patients ranged between 14.3 and 18.6 (median, 16.6) on the Shipley-Institute of Living Scale. The range of their conceptual quotients (CQ) on this scale was between 51 and 96 (median, 73.5). All patients appeared to be in good contact at the times of testing and experimentation (which were spaced approximately one week apart) and showed willingness to cooperate in all phases of the experiment. All patients were receiving some form of tranquilizing drug; none were under treatment with insulin or electroshock.A non-schizophrenic group was composed of four medical students and eight clinical psychology and experimental psychology trainees (graduate students receiving training in the Veterans Administration Hospitals). These subjects, nine males and three females, ranged in age from 22 to 38 years (median, 26).The performance of the twenty-four schizophrenic patients on the ShipleyInstitute of Living Scale yielded a wide range of scores on the vocabulary scale, the abstract thinking scale, and the conceptual quotient. Ten of the patients had a diagnosis of schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type; the others were diagnosed as schizophrenic reactions of the five other types, viz., catatonic, hebephrenic, mixed, undifferentiated, or simple. Since it seemed possible that level of performance on cer...
Data from 313 Ss seem to indicate that the Semantic Differential is an inadequate tool for distinguishing between suicidal and non-suicidal behaviors among a neuropsychiatric population.
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