The influence of instructional set on schizophrenic vs. organic concreteness

36 male patients (12 schizophrenic, 12 organic, and 12 neurotic), age 19-57, each took two forms of the Gorham Proverbs test under two different instructional sets. It was hypothesized that for schizophrenics, a higher level of abstraction would be obtained on the proverbs task when the instructions required less personal involvement of the patient than when a more personalized set was used; whereas the performance of organic and neurotic patients would not be affected by the variation in instructional set. The results indicate that instructional set does significantly alter the concreteness of the schizophrenic's response to proverbs, but has little effect on the responses of the other two groups.