Nonpsychotic Psychiatric Patients Research Articles

Overinclusion, broad scanning, and picture recognition in schizophrenics.

Difficulty of picture and word recognition was manipulated to test the hypothesis that schizophrenics have adequate recognition memories and to determine whether overinclusion is related to a good visual recognition memory. Good and poor premorbid, acute and chronic schizophrenics were compared to nonpsychotic psychiatric patients and to hospital aides. Both Payne's Object Classification Test and Goldstein-Scheerer's Object Sorting Test were given to all the patients, but only the former differentiated among the diagnostic subgroups and was related to good picture memory. When the measures of overinclusion, chronicity, premorbidity and intelligence were used as independent variables in a multiple regression, only Payne NonA predicted success on the picture task. Good premorbid schizophrenics recognized pictures as well as normals and nonpsychotics, but poor premorbids' picture memory was significantly worse. No experimental variable predicted word performance in a multiple regression, and good premorbids did not differ from poor premorbids on their word recognition. The authors favored the interpretation that the pattern of performance of overinclusive schizophrenics reflects their tendency to scan broadly both important and unimportant features of stimuli.

The cardiac responses of schizophrenics to orienting, signal and non-signal tones

The cardiac responses of schizophrenics were examined under three conditions: (1) to repeated 75 dB, 1000 Hz (orienting) tones of no attentional significance; (2) to 75 dB, 1000 and 2000 Hz tones presented randomly and requiring a motor response to the 1000 Hz (signal) tone; (3) to 85 dB, 1000 Hz orienting tones. Responses of non-psychotic psychiatric patients were examined to the 75 dB tones. All patients were subdivided upon the basis of electrodermal responsivity during conditions (1) and (3), into groups of responders — no habituation of responses ; non-responders — no responses ; habituators — responses habituated to criterion. All groups exhibited a decelerative response with a latency of less than 1 sec. The groups were differentiated by the second component of the response to the orienting tones: responders — acceleration; habituators — deceleration; non-responders — predominantly no response. All exhibited accelerative responses to the signal tones. Parallels between cardiac and electrodermal responsivity are outlined.

Assessment of change in conventional and unconventional thought processes of schizophrenics.

Summary A creativity test was adapted to the measurement of schizophrenic thought processes. Schizophrenics and nonpsychotic psychiatric patients were asked to give practical and unusual uses for items in Guilford's Alternate Uses Test. Responses were scored as conventional (concrete), imaginative (abstract), or autistic. Schizophrenics did not differ from nonpsychotics in frequency nor pattern of conventional responses. However, nonpsychotics gave proportionately more imaginative uses following unusual uses instructions while schizophrenics gave proportionately more autistic responses. Schizophrenics maintained a significantly elevated autistic response level regardless of subsequent requests to be practical.

Rorschach scores and schizophrenia: an evaluation of Weiner's signs in clinical practice.

Summary Weiner's (1961) signs are used as a means of post hoc discrimination of schizophrenia from nonpsychotic psychiatric patients in a demonstration of the clinical method. All 60 patients tested were marginal diagnostic problems and final diagnosis was independently determined. Results approach but do not achieve significance and may be taken as supporting use of nonstatistical criteria for individual assessment purposes.

Epinephrine and insulin effects. II. ACTH and cortisol.

IN VIEW of the central role which stress is assumed to take in many psychophysiologic interpretations of psychiatric disorder, interest has long been focused on the function of the pituitary-adrenal system in psychiatric illness. However, no direct measure of ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) activity have been obtained in studies of the response of psychotic or nonpsychotic psychiatric patients to stress. In addition, in only a few studies^1-4have detectable levels of ACTH been reliably established in normal humans with no known endocrine pathology. Thus the report by Vernikos-Danellis and Marks,⁵in which increased blood levels of ACTH were found 2½ minutes after the intravenous administration of epinephrine to normal subjects, was viewed with great interest. Epinephrine was therefore chosen in this study as an adequate stressor with which to compare psychotic patients with nonpsychotic controls. Insulin was chosen for two reasons, one