The present study examined the hypothesis that working memory deficits contribute to both negative thought disorder and some components of formal thought disorder (discourse coherence and fluency deficits) in individuals with schizophrenia. We examined the language produced by 44 patients with either schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder during baseline and a dual-task condition designed to...

According to personality systems interaction theory, a negative mood was expected to reduce access to extended semantic networks and to reduce performance on intuitive judgments of coherence for participants who have an impaired ability to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., state-oriented participants). Consistent with expectations, state-oriented participants reporting higher levels of perse...

A review of findings shows that Persian gardens have attracted a wide area of interests between psychologists and environment designers. The main reasons behind the attraction of Persian gardens are natural content and particular landscape configuration. To study these features, overall organization examination is employed according to psychological pattern. One of the impressive psychological ...

Objective: Many studies have suggested that there is a relationship between coherence and cognitive processes. This study aims at investigating this hypothesis through assessing the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in the discourse of two groups of Persian-speaking younger and older adults. Methods: In order to evaluate our participants' cognitive capabilities, we recrui...

David Oaks I would like to thank PLoS Medicine for publishing Lacasse and Leo’s important and methodical Essay that debunks the “chemical imbalance” advertisements for psychiatric drugs [1]. Why would the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve such ads? Our human rights group, MindFreedom International, has been asking that question for a long time. On behalf of MindFreedom, U...

This paper provides a computational characterization of coherence that applies to a wide range of philosophical problems and psychological phenomena. Maximizing coherence is a matter of maximizing satisfaction of a set of positive and negative constraints. After comparing five algorithms for maximizing coherence, we show how our characterization of coherence overcomes traditional philosophical ...