Paired-associate learning of affective words in chronic schizophrenics

This study investigated the acquisition of affective and neutral words in a paired-associate list by chronic schizophrenics and normals. Ten paired associates in which stimulus terms were nonsense syllables and response terms were words (five affective and five neutral) were learned by 30 chronic schizophrenics (15 male, 15 female) and 30 normals (15 male, 15 female) according to an anticipation procedure. The schizophrenics learned significantly fewer affective words than neutral words, while normals learned an equal number of affective and neutral words. This effect, however, progressively diminished throughout trials for the schizophrenics such that no differences were observed in the final trial for the two types of response words. These results are discussed in terms of habituation of an anxiety response evoked by the affective words.