The present study investigated whether schizophrenic, unipolar depressive, and obsessive-compulsive psychiatric patients show a distinguishable profile in tasks considered sensitive to frontal lobe functioning. Three psychiatric samples, each comprising 25 patients with little symptomatic overlap, were compared to 70 healthy controls. Participants completed several executive tasks (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), verbal fluency, digit span, Stroop, and Trail-Making). Except for age, which was entered as a covariate, subjects did not differ in any sociodemographic background variable. Healthy controls showed superior performance relative to depressive and schizophrenic patients who exhibited comparable deficits in all tasks. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients revealed dysfunctions in the Trail-Making Tests A and B and in the fluency task. Dysfunctions in the domains of working memory, verbal fluency, distractibility, and concept formation were not confined to a specific psychiatric population.

Our results strongly indicate that in-patients with obsessive-compulsive hoarding respond poorly to CBT.

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In line with Spitzer and Maher it is inferred that disinhibited semantic networks underlie formal thought disorder in schizophrenia. For future research, it would be appropriate to: employ indirect semantic priming rather than direct semantic priming conditions; and, pay more attention to potential moderators of the priming effect, most importantly, the prime display duration and the length of the stimulus onset asynchrony.

There is indirect evidence from previous research that several executive disturbances in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are mediated by comorbid depressive symptoms. For the present study, the authors investigated whether OCD patients with elevated Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) scores would exhibit deficits in tasks sensitive to the medial and dorsolateral frontal cortex as well as other executive tasks. The 36 OCD patients were split along the median according to their HRSD scores and compared with matched control subjects. Patients with high HRSD scores performed significantly worse than control subjects and patients with low HRSD scores on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Trail-Making Test (TMT, Part B), and the TMT difference score. Moreover, patients with high HRSD scores exhibited deficits on a (creative) verbal fluency task. It is suggested that comorbid depressive symptoms may have artificially inflated some executive deficit scores in previous studies.