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Associative and conceptual organization in thought disorder
The British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology
|September 1, 1976
Summary
Thought disorder is not specifically a deficit in conceptual use. Patients with thought disorder showed general recall disorganization, not specific clustering issues, impacting learning over time.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psychiatry
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Thought disorder is conceptualized as impaired associative hierarchies or class-based reasoning.
- Free recall organization, specifically word clustering, offers a method to investigate these conceptualizations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the nature of thought disorder using a free recall task.
- To differentiate between associative and taxonomic clustering in thought-disordered patients.
Main Methods:
- Two groups of psychiatric patients (thought-disordered and non-thought-disordered) were assessed.
- Participants recalled word lists with associatively and taxonomically related pairs.
- Clustering tendencies and recall improvement across trials were analyzed.
Main Results:
- Thought-disordered and non-thought-disordered groups did not differ in clustering specific pair types.
- Thought-disordered patients exhibited a general lack of organization in recall.
- Significantly less improvement in recall amount was observed in the thought-disordered group over trials.
Conclusions:
- The findings do not support thought disorder as solely a deficit in concept use or mediation.
- Further research should explore factors influencing mediational link activation and inhibition in thinking.