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Communication disturbances in schizophrenia and mania
N M Docherty1, M DeRosa, N C Andreasen
1Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn, USA.
Archives of General Psychiatry
|April 1, 1996
Summary
Researchers developed a natural language measure to assess communication disturbances in psychotic patients. This method effectively distinguishes speech patterns in schizophrenia and mania from controls, highlighting differences in communication failures.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Clinical Psychology
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Communication disturbance is a key feature in psychotic disorders.
- Assessing linguistic reference performance offers a novel approach to quantify these disturbances.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a natural language measure for classifying the type and severity of communication disturbance in psychotic patients.
- To compare communication failure patterns in schizophrenia, mania, and nonpsychiatric individuals.
Main Methods:
- A natural language measure assessing linguistic reference performance was applied to speech samples.
- Speech samples were collected from patients with schizophrenia, patients with mania, and nonpsychiatric control subjects.
- Quantitative and qualitative analyses compared communication failure frequencies and types across groups.
Main Results:
- Schizophrenic and manic subjects exhibited significantly higher frequencies of communication failures compared to controls.
- Six distinct types of communication failures were more prevalent in psychotic patients' speech.
- The distribution of specific communication failure types varied between schizophrenic and manic groups.
Conclusions:
- The developed measure reliably quantifies overall communication disturbance severity in psychosis.
- It effectively discriminates speech in schizophrenia and mania from nonpsychiatric speech.
- The measure may aid in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of psychotic communication deficits.