Psychological deficit in schizophrenia: I. Affect, reinforcement, concept attainment.

Abstract

This, the 1st of 2 papers reviewing laboratory studies of psychological deficit in schizophrenia, considers the effects of social censure, affective stimuli, cooperation, urging, and verbal and nonverbal reinforcers on performance on a variety of tasks. Thus, disturbance in concept formation is evaluated in terms of: loss of abstract attitude, communication disturbance, regression, and the consequence of erratic attention. Finally, various theories of schizophrenic deficit are evaluated. Although motivational constructs cannot be wholly dismissed, interference theory is generally more comprehensive and parsimonious. Many specific hypotheses of interference theory still need to be substantiated by experiment, however.

Roles of Interpersonal Contact and Verbal Content in Abstract Thinking Deficits of Schizophrenics

“…The findings are incocsistent with the often cited contention (Buss & Lang, 1965;McGaughran & Morza, 1957) that schizophrenics are not deficient in their ability to form abstract concepts but produce concepts with deviant content. Reasons for the differences in findings are not clear, but they may reflect variations in methodology.…”

Sex-linked censure expectancies in process and reactive schizophrenics1

“…In a review of research concerning deficit in schizophremcs, Buss and Lang (1965) have argued that the available data do not support a social censure interpretation They note that 1 The authors wish to express appreciation to Dr Irwm W Silverman for his help with design problems They also acknowledge an mdebtedness to staff members of the Lakeshore Psychiatnc Hospital who contnbuted to the project We are particularly grateful to members of the psychology service who did most of the data collection m the course of their regular dubes, and to the umt directors who made patients and nursing sta£F available to our needs…”

Combined LORETA and fMRI study of recognition of eyes and eye movement in schizophrenia

“…This type of processing leads to an overemphasis on non-critical features and to a depletion of available attention recourse before processing the critical features or interpreting wholes as meaningful gestalts. This might be implicated in their deficient facial -affect recognition [6] or impaired capacity to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant stimulus fragments [2]. The present finding revealed patients' attenuated activation for the static face in the temporal regions either in fMRI or LORETA.…”