Affective reactivity of language in schizophrenia

Thirty acutely schizophrenic inpatients each provided two speech samples: one on affectively negative, "high-stress" topics and one on affectively positive, "low-stress" topics. We analyzed these using two different, established methods for assessment of deviance in natural language, including clinical measures of thought disorder and linguistic measures of reference performance. For the group as a whole, the speech on negative topics contained more disorder than did the speech on positive topics, as rated both clinically and linguistically, and these differences were sizeable and highly significant. Level of language disturbance and degree of affective reactivity of language symptoms correlated positively with severity of the positive syndrome but were not associated in either direction with negative syndrome severity. Affective reactivity of symptoms is discussed as a variable potentially relevant to studies of psychophysiology and subtyping in schizophrenia.