WAIS Verbal and Performance IQ scores were obtained from medical records of 500 psychiatric inpatients recently admitted to a large university hospital. With a subsample of the original 500 patients for whom there was diagnostic agreement between two independent clinicians, a multivariate analysis of variance was carried out to determine the extent to which the Verbal and Performance scores discriminated among eight diagnostic categories into which patients were classified. In the multivariate ANOVA, statistical techniques were employed to control for concomitant background variation that otherwise might have been confounded with true diagnostic group differences in Verbal and Performance IQ. Although mentally retarded and organic brain syndrome patients could be distinguished significantly from other diagnostic groups on the basis of their lower total IQ scores, the data did not support the persistent clinical belief that functional psychiatric disorders differed in the WAIS measurement space.
The nature of disturbed thinking is explained from two different psychological perspectives and six major types of thought disorder are presented, classified, and discussed. The overlap between these different types of thought disturbance and some possible functions of disturbed thinking are outlined. A heuristic model for detecting thought disorder is presented; and, in addition, some complex conceptual and research issues involved with investigating and systematizing knowledge about disturbed thinking are explained.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.