Conservation and formal thought disorder in schizophrenic and schizotypal children

Abstract

We studied the conservation scores of 21 schizophrenic and schizotypal children (aged 6;7–12;5 years) and 21 yoked normal mental age matches and their relationship to the Kiddie Formal Thought Disorder Scale measures. Like the normal children, the schizophrenic/schizotypal subjects were able to recognize the invariance of two dimensional space, number, and substance, but not of weight. Unlike the normal children, the schizophrenic/schizotypal children were poor conservers of continuous and discontinuous matter, and this was related to their illogical thinking scores. Age and IQ accounted for the conservation competence of the normal children. The conservation skills of the patients, however, were associated with the severity of their formal thought disorder scores, not with their age or IQ. The developmental approach employed in this study enabled further clarification of the cognitive parameters of formal thought disorder in middle childhood. We discuss the developmental, clinical, and possible information processing implications of these findings.

Formal Thought Disorder in Pediatric Complex Partial Seizure Disorder

“…Finally, we computed pairwise comparisons among the three diagnostic groups using ^-scores derived from the standard errors. Caplan et al (1989Caplan et al ( , 1990a showed that a loose associations score of 0 has 97% specificity; we therefore regarded loose associations as a dichotomous phenomenon that was present or absent. The normal group included more bilingual Asian, bilingual Hispanic and Hollingshead III, but less Hollingshead II subjects than the patient groups.…”

“…Table 1 presents the mean age, IQand demographic characteristics of these three groups of children. The formal thought disorder scores, WISC-R scores and WISC-R factor scores of the schizophrenic children have been previously reported (Caplan et al, 1990b(Caplan et al, , 1990c. We address the IQ differences between the two patient groups (FSIQ^pj,^,,,^, = 90, SD = 23.07; FSIQs,h,.ophren,a = 90, SD =12.37) and the normal group (FSIQ= 113,SD = 15.09) in the data analysis section of this paper.…”

“…After partialling out the variance from the distractibility factor score, loose associations no longer correlated with fullscale and performance IQ scores. Caplan et al (1990a) found that an illogical thinking score of 0.1 has a sensitivity and specificity of 82% and 66%, respectively. We subdivided the seizure disorder subjects into those with high (illogical thinking > 0.3) and low scores (illogical thinking < 0.3) to examine the relationship between severity of formal thought disorder, age of onset of seizure disorder, duration of illness, seizure control and psychiatric diagnosis (Table 4).…”

“…The child with illogical thinking presents the listener with inappropriate reasoning and has poor abstract skills (Caplan et al, 1989;Caplan, Foy, Sigman & Perdue, 1990a). Based on Slater and Beard's (1963) fmdings in adults, we predicted that children with complex partial seizures would use significantly more illogical thinking than normal children, but less than schizophrenic children.…”

“…Finally, signs of formal thought disorder correlate with specific impairments of attention/information processing in schizophrenic children (Caplan, Foy, Asarnow &. Sherman, 1990b).…”