[The five-minute interview. A brief method for assessing expressed emotion status]

The Camberwell Family Interview (CFI) has been developed to assess the expressed emotion status (EE), a measure of the attitudes and feelings that a relative expresses about a schizophrenic family member. The EE measure has shown to be a good predictor of relapses in the course of schizophrenia, and has proved valid in a number of different cultures. However, the extensive, semistructured CFI is so time-consuming, that it only has been employed in a few specialized research centers. Therefore a brief method for assessing the EE index has been developed on the basis of a 5-minute speech sample (FMSS), which showed a reasonable correspondence with EE ratings derived from the CFI. The present article describes the development of a German version of the FMSS. The correspondence between blind EE ratings derived from the FMSS and the CFI was investigated on a sample of 176 interviews of relatives of schizophrenics. The relationship between the procedures to assess the EE index was significantly close. These results show the validity of the FMSS as a brief EE screening procedure for German-speaking populations.