Severity of thought disorder in schizophrenics was assessed by a task that involved recognition of joy and shame expressions, with the expressions varied for typicality of the emotion category. Accuracy, typicality rating, and reaction time were measured in schizophrenic patients who were high or low on Whitaker's Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST) and in depressive and normal controls. All groups had significant variation of typicality ratings for joy (normal typicality range), but the clinical groups had smaller typicality ranges for shame recognition and higher mean typicality ratings than did normals. High WIST schizophrenics were least accurate on low typical shame expressions. Results imply that, for shame recognition, schizophrenic and depressive groups used common categorization (no typicality variation in category members) rather than resemblance categorization.
Examined the category structure of “joy” and “shame” emotions. In this study the organization of emotions into abstract categories with a prototype structure based on family resemblances was proposed. Forty male introductory psychology students judged 56 slides of human faces (posed by other such students) as expressing either joy or shame and rated the degree of typicality of each face. Faces rated as more typical were recognized signicantly more quickly and accurately. Correlations between typicality and latency were also significant. More intense expressions of both emotion categories were rated as more typical of the category. A reliable instrument for future study of recognition of the two emotions was developed. The family resemblance‐prototype structure for emotion categories was supported.
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