Communication deviances in parents of schizophrenics

In an attempt to make a multimethod assessment of communication deviance in parents of schizophrenics, a communication conflict situation (CCS) and the TAT were used to obtain qualitative and quantitative measures of communication for a sample of 50 parental couples, 21 of which were parents of schizophrenics, 9 were parents of nonpsychotic psychiatric patients, and 20 were parents of normals. The results were a general confirmation of earlier reports that communication deviance is an outstanding characteristic in families with a schizophrenic offspring. The most important finding, however, was that parents of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics score very differently on a majority of the communication variables. Parents of nonparanoid schizophrenics form one extreme on a continuum of communication deviance, and parents of paranoid schizophrenics and normals the other. Egocentrism, measured by CCS, turned out to be the single qualitative variable with best discriminating power across all groups.