Psychological deficit versus impression management in schizophrenic word association performance.

Schizophrenic performance has been interpreted as being the result of ability loss and more recently as the result of impression management. An experiment is reported which allows a direct test of the ability loss assumption as opposed to one form of the impression management hypothesis. Healthy presenter and sick presenter schizophrenic 5s were given differential "normative" information concerning the meaning of word association performance. Healthy presenter schizophrenics shifted their performance in the direction predicted by the impression management hypothesis but sick presenters did not. The results suggest that the likelihood of occurrence of impression management depends heavily on the degree of pathology displayed by 5.