| dc.description.abstract | The literature relating to the clinical features of, and experimental findings on, flattening of affect, thought disorder and retardation in schizophrenia was reviewed.
A group of 24 hospitalised schizophrenics, including males and females, acutes and chronics and paranoid and non-paranoids, was given a battery of tests comprising: S.S.I., Mill Hill Synonyms Scale, Bannister-Fransella Grid Test, Dixon Flattening of Affect Test, Nufferno Speed and Level Tests, G.A.T.B. Motor Speed Test, Speed of Writing Sentences and Digit Symbol.
An attempt to replicate Buckley's (1969) finding that a poor performance on the Bannister-Fransella Test was associated with a poor performance on the Dixon Test and that both could be seen as the result of a faulty personal construct system, was only partly successful with acute schizophrenics: the finding was not replicated with chronic schizophrenics.
Performances on both the Bannister-Fransella Test and the Dixon Test were found to be unrelated to vocabulary level and general intelligence. The tests were, in the light of previous validity findings, used as operational definitions of thought disorder and flattening of affect respectively. Various relevant patient variables (sex, age, degree of illness) and subcategories of schizophrenia (paranoid-non-paranoid, acute- chronic) were thus related to flattening of affect and thought disorder. None of the patient variables was related to either of the symptoms and neither was the paranoid-non-paranoid classification. It was found, however, that chronic schizophrenics were both more affectively flattened and more thought disordered than acutes.
The matrix of correlations between the speed tests clearly indicated that speed of functioning in a schizophrenic could best be represented by two relatively independent factors, which were called mental and psychomotor speed in the present thesis.
Mental and psychomotor speed were related to the patient variables and subcategories of schizophrenia listed above as well as vocabulary level and general intelligence. There were no significant differences between groups on the mental speed tests but on the psychomotor speed tests younger schizophrenics were slower, but, so were chronic schizophrenics. The most outstanding feature of the group^s' performance on these tests was the great variability within any subgroup.
Neither flattening of affect nor thought disorder were found to be related to mental or psychomotor speed. | en |
