Cognitive Deficits and Thought Disorder: A Retest Study

Abstract

Manic (n = 26), schizophrenic (n = 26), and normal (n = 25) subjects were examined with a digit span distraction task and with a reality monitoring task. All subjects were tested twice at a 4-day interval, and a clinical assessment of thought disorder was conducted both times on the patients. We found that reality monitoring, distraction task performance, and clinical thought disorder were all quite stable at the retest interval. We further found that different patterns of correlational relationships between cognitive deficits and positive and negative thought disorders were present in the manic and schizophrenic samples. When we conducted a cross-temporal analysis of our data, we found that no cognitive deficits in mania predicted the severity of positive thought disorder over time, although the severity of thought disorder predicted distraction performance over time. In the schizophrenic subjects, distraction performance, but not reality monitoring, exerted a significant cross-temporal influence on positive thought disorder.

Neurocognitive and social cognitive correlates of formal thought disorder in schizophrenia patients

“…Our findings regarding list learning intrusions are also consistent with the hypothesis of Harrow et al (1989) that bizarre-idiosyncratic thinking results, in part, from an inability to adequately monitor verbal output for errors. Our current results from the attentional tasks replicate Silverstein et al's (1993) finding that intellectual ability and complex attention were predictive of bizarre-idiosyncratic thinking and extend earlier work relating sustained and complex attention and working memory capacity to positive formal thought disorder assessed with the Thought Disorder Index (Holzman et al, 1986;Nuechterlein et al, 1986) and the TLC (Andreasen, 1986;Harvey et al, 1988;Serper et al, 1990).…”

Use of text stimuli normalizes reality monitoring in schizophrenics

“…In earlier studies (Harvey, 1985;Harvey et al, 1988), the say-think discrimination ratios for normals for immediate choice recognition of eight-word lists ranged from .72 to .79, with patients' performance ranging from .61 to .79 . The performance of the patients in the present study, therefore , was substantially better than the performance of normals in Ha~ vey's earlier word-list studies; consequently, the.…”

“…Schizophrenicpatients who manifested verbal communication disturbances (i.e., " formal thought disorder") were less competent than normals at discriminating the actual origin of information that they had said, as opposed to thought, and tended to make recognition errors that were the polar opposite of normal biases. Harvey et al (1988) found that the concurrent presence of reality-monitoring discrimination problems and a "think-report-say" recognition error bias predicted the In this report we present data from a modification of the reality-monitoring procedure as applied to schizophrenic and normal subjects and a psychiatric control sample . We changed the typical reality-monitoring task, in which the subject is asked to discriminate the origin of word stimuli from a list, by having the subjects discriminate the origin of word stimuli that had been contained in a story that they had either planned or planned and generated.…”

“…Schizophrenicpatients who manifested verbal communication disturbances (i.e., " formal thought disorder") were less competent than normals at discriminating the actual origin of information that they had said, as opposed to thought, and tended to make recognition errors that were the polar opposite of normal biases. Harvey et al (1988) found that the concurrent presence of reality-monitoring discrimination problems and a "think-report-say" recognition error bias predicted the Copyright 1988 Psychonomic Society, Inc . severity of communication disturbances much better than either problem alone.…”

“…In earlier studies of reality-monitoring ability in psychotic patients, Harvey (1985;Harvey, Earle-Boyer, & Levinson, 1988) found that schizophrenic patients had characteristic problems in reality monitoring. Schizophrenicpatients who manifested verbal communication disturbances (i.e., " formal thought disorder") were less competent than normals at discriminating the actual origin of information that they had said, as opposed to thought, and tended to make recognition errors that were the polar opposite of normal biases.…”