Abstract thinking deficit and autism in process and reactive schizophrenics.

Abstract

While it is generally agreed that schizophrenics do poorly on abstraction tasks, there is much disagreement as to the specific nature of their abstracting deficit(s). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of inability to abstract and autism on the proverbs interpretations of process and reactive schizophrenics. Forty-eight reactive schizophrenics, 48 process schizophrenics, and 24 normals were scored for Abstract Level and Autism on Gorham's Proverbs. Compared to normals, both schizophrenic groups were abnormal on each measure, both before and after the groups were matched for vocabulary. However, process schizophrenics were more deficient on Abstract Level than reactives. There was no significant difference between the mean Autism scores of the two schizophrenic groups until the effects of Abstract Level were removed. Then it was seen that Autism was more prominent among reactives than process subjects. Studied independently of one another, loss of abstract ability characterized process schizophrenics, while autism was more typical of reactives.

Logical, reasoning deficits in schizophrenia and brain damage

“…Because this single significant correlation was both small and precisely the number one would have predicted to appear by chance alone, the correlational analvses probably are interpreted best as negative. I n addition, we ran the Pearson correlations of Overexpansive and Von Domarus errors with Proverbs Autism scores, a previously documented (Watson, 1973;Watson, Plemel, & Burke, 1979) measure of specific schizophrenic thought disorder, in our 100 schizophrenics. Both were small (rs = .23 and .22, respectively, both p s <.05).…”

“…Affective psychotics were excluded from the control sample. The presence of thought disorders in the schizophrenics was documented by comparing the mean Proverbs autism (Shimkunas, Gynther, & Smith, 1967;Watson, 1973) scores' of the 100 schizophrenics (.23, SD = .24) and 50 controls (.15, SD = .16); the difference was significant a t .05 (t 11481 = 2.20). After the groups were matched (see below) the schizophrenics' mean (.25, S D = .23) was compared to that of the organics and controls combined (.17, SD = .15).…”

Translation in bilingual psychotherapy.

“…The paranoid person, by contrast, may be more circumspect in word choice, carefully weighing each communication so as to bait the listener with eccentric and ambiguous messages (see Oxman, Rosenberg, & Tucker, 1982). To the extreme, thought disorder, as found in schizophrenia (Bradford, 1984(Bradford, , 1985Kasanin, 1964;Rabin, Doneson, & Jentons, 1979;Watson, 1972), can inhibit the capacity for reasoning and abstraction, disrupt orderly associative processes, elicit bizarre ideational content, broaden the usual semantic constraints that shape word choice, and, to the far extreme, lead to a series of neologisms that resemble the brain-damaged patient's jargon aphasia (Bradford, 1992). It goes without saying that these several conditions would pose considerable difficulty for a translator during the psychotherapy of a seriously disturbed patient.…”

A systems model of schizophrenic dysfunction

“…It is not surprising that schizophrenics show the same tendencies on tests of abstraction which are evident in their other verbal productions; they tend to be autistic, idiosyncratic, tangential, and often bizarre. Watson (1973Watson ( ,1976 reported that autistic interference was more prominent in reactives than process schizophrenics. Blaufarb (1962) was the first to report a method which enabled schizophrenics to approximate normal performance on tests of abstraction.…”