This investigation tested the validity of Loren Chapman's theory of schizophrenic thought disorder. The vocabulary test from the Shipley-Hartford Scale served as the control task, and the multiple-choice vocabulary test used by Boland and Chapman to disclose a schizophrenic deficit related to thought disorder served as the experimental task. Two groups of hospitalized psychiatric patients, one group classified as schizophrenic and the other as psychiatric controls, served as subjects. Both groups performed below the normal level reported by Boland and Chapman but somewhat above the mean level of the chronic schizophrenics they tested. The schizophrenic group in this study did not perform differently from the psychiatric controls on the experimental task. The results were interpreted as indicating that some factor other than schizophrenic thought disorder was being measured by the experimental task.Schizophrenia, both as a disease and as a topic for psychological research, appears much like a tangled net that resists untangling, with a tight knot for a core and many loose ends on the surface. Although one cannot blame the patients for appearing as unfathomable as they often do, some blame has been directed toward the research-academic arena. For instance, in his textbook Maher (1966) summarized the situation this way:The vast array of data accumulated so far on the behavior of a person described as schizophrenic will fill the reader with puzzled dismay. Hypothesis struggles with hypothesis in a conflict in which new contenders enter the field but the defeated never retire, (p. 433) Journal editors also have been criticized for "rejecting out of hand replication studies" (Zimet & Fishman, 1970, p. 117), thereby This study is adapted from a thesis submitted by the first author in 1974 under the guidance of the second author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa.
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