Conceptual Thinking in Psychiatric Patients

Interpretation of Ambiguous Idiomatic Statements in Schizophrenic and Depressive Patients. Evidence for Common and Differential Cognitive Patterns

“…Concreteness is considered to be present if the interpretation of the proverb contains one and/or two key symbols from the proverb, for example ' mice' and 'cat' in the proverb 'When the cat's away, the mice will play'. These traditional ratings [6,8] have been criticized because: (a) they confound concreteness (concentration on the literal dimensions of certain parts of the sentence) and literality (the global interpretation of the literal meaning) [9] ; (b) the low abstraction scores may refl ect a variety of disorders discernible in autistic responses [9][10][11] or idiosyncratic and bizarre responses [12,13] ; (c) the evaluation of abstraction is linked to IQ [14,15] (when the IQ of all participants is equal, these diffi culties are not specifi c to schizophrenic patients compared with other, non-schizophrenic psychiatric patients [15] ), and (d) the quality of the responses depends on the role of the rater [16] and the instructions given to the patients [17] .…”

Cognitive Functioning in Acute and Remitted Psychiatric Patients

“…In a recent paper the present authors ( 5 ) have suggested that this and other forms of cognitive deficit may not be unique to schizophrenia but also could be observed in other acute non-schizophrenic psychiatric patients. This finding was consistent with conclusions reached in a recent review of the literature by Buss and Lang (1,3) who concluded that psychological deficit may be related to severity of psychopathology and may not be limited to schizophrenics.…”

“…Gorham Proverb Test Forms I1 and I11 were administered in coi~nterbalanced order and were scored for level of abstraction by a method described previously ( 5 ) . The Shipley-Hartford Scale was repeated for each S and scored in the standard fashion for Abstraction and Vocabulary scores.…”

The relationship of depression and thought disorder in pain patients

“…The presence of thought disorder associated with depression has been both supported (Harrow et al, 1972; Braff & Beck, 1974; Donnelly et al, 1980) and contradicted (Salzman et al, 1966;Andreasen, 1976). In order to clarify the amount and type of thought disorder that occurs with depression this study examined three areas of cognitive function in depressed and non-depressed groups.…”

“…The results extend our knowledge of the relationship of thinking disorder and depression. Looking at the tachistoscopic data the two groups did not differ significantly in the critical stimulus duration (CSD) scores, a measure of input capability (Salnnan et af. , 1966;Braff, 1981). With masked stimuli there was a significant difference in the number of correct detections for the two groups, with depressives scoring lower.…”