Many studies have reported that schizophrenic patients show a Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE). This cognitive bias has been related to the formation and maintenance of delusion. The aim of this paper was to study whether BADE was present in healthy people displaying psychometric schizotypy, and to compare a closure task, which has been used for schizophrenia, with a new chronometri...

The intent of the study was to find out whether raters possessing certain characteristics might be better at predicting speech in general, using the cloze procedure, and also whether some raters might be better at predicting certain types of speech (alcoholic vs. schizophrenic speech). 279 raters were characterized in terms of IS variables, including 7 socioeconomic characteristics and 6 verbal...

The present report examined the latent structure of schizophrenic phenomenology. Schizophrenic patient case histories (n = 192) were rated for positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and premorbid social adjustment and the observed covariation among these clinical features was evaluated using a model-based confirmatory factor analytic approach. Our results indicated that schizophrenic phenomenolo...

Perceptual asymmetry was measured in acutely psychotic schizophrenic patients and normal controls using a dichotic monitoring task. Although the schizophrenic group differed from the controls in terms of accuracy and speed of response, there were no significant group differences with respect to asymmetries in these variables. The pattern of responding in the schizophrenic group was also examine...

To examine the neurophysiological and cognitive characteristics of thought disturbance in schizophrenic patients, we examined the amplitude, latency, and topography of a specific event-related brain potential (ERP), the N400, which is elicited by semantically incongruent words and phrases. Twelve chronic schizophrenic patients and twelve age-matched control subjects read sentences presented vis...

Abnormal prefrontal function plays a central role in the cognition deficits of schizophrenic patients; however, the character of the relationship between discriminant analysis and prefrontal activation remains undetermined. Recently, evidence of low prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation in individuals with schizophrenia has also been found during verbal fluency tests (VFT) and other cognitive test...

INTRODUCTION Although substance abuse is an important clinical problem in schizophrenic patients, very little evidence explains why these patients use drugs and alcohol. This study therefore aimed to examine whether premorbid personality disorders affect substance abuse. METHODS The sample included 40 male schizophrenic patients with and 40 male schizophrenic patients without substance use di...

OBJECTIVE To outline mental health service accessibility, estimate the treatment gap and describe service utilization for people with schizophrenic disorders in 50 low- and middle-income countries. METHODS The World Health Organization Assessment Instrument for Mental Health Systems was used to assess the accessibility of mental health services for schizophrenic disorders and their utilizatio...

To investigate the role of methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase gene polymorphisms in schizophrenia, we analyzed the genotypes of MTHFR677 and MTHFR1298 of 130 schizophrenic patients and 226 controls, using a polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism method. The MTHFR T677 allele was significantly distributed (chi(2)=7.900; P=0.019), between schizophrenic cases and healt...

Schizophrenic, affective disorder, and normal subjects performed tasks involving exogenous (automatic) and endogenous (voluntary) attention. In the exogenous attention task, schizophrenic subjects demonstrated a greater benefit in response time than did normal subjects. In the endogenous attention task, however, schizophrenic subjects showed a smaller benefit in response time than did normal su...