Psychiatric illness in first-degree relatives of patients with paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia and medical illness.

This study examines the respective morbid risk for psychiatric illness determined by the family history method in the first-degree relatives of medical controls and patients with delusional disorder (paranoid psychosis) and schizophrenia. The morbid risk for schizophrenia and schizoid-schizotypal personality disorder was significantly greater in the relatives of the schizophrenic patients than in those of the delusional disorder or medical control patients, but no difference in the risk for affective illness or alcoholism was found in the three groups of relatives. Paranoid personality disorder was significantly more common in the relatives of the delusional disorder patients than in those of the medical controls. These results support the familial independence of delusional disorder and schizophrenia.

A family history study of schizophrenia-related personality disorders.

This study examined whether the family history method can be used to detect cases of schizophrenia-related personality disorder in the families of schizophrenic patients. After proposing specific family history criteria for this diagnosis, the authors applied these criteria in a blind family history study and found that schizophrenia-related personality disorders were significantly more common in the first-degree relatives of schizophrenic patients than in the relatives of medically ill controls.

Integration of post-exposural directional scanning and cerebral dominance explanations of lateral differences in trachistoscopic recognition.

Post-exposural directional scanning and cerebral dominance are major postualtes which account for lateral differences in tachistoscopic perception. These ideas can be intergrated when tachistoscopic perception is viewed as a short-term memory task. Briefly exposed stimuli not only have to be scanned, but also rehearsed, subvocally, before they can be encoded. Since most Ss are left-hemisphere dominant for language, scanned information arriving in the right hemisphere has to be sent to the left hemisphere for rehearsal. This transmission effects a loss of scanned information because it is held in a rapidly dissipating storage. These ideas account for lateral differences found with vertically and horizontally oriented targets, but methodological considerations are discussed which indicate that these notions are more clearly demonstrable with the former than latter displays .

Note on duration of stimulus exposure in experiments on covert scanning of laterally shown targets.

Prevention of contamination by eye movements is on methodological requirement in the choice of an exposure time in experiments on the covert scanning of stimuli, tachistoscopically exposed laterally. The use of measures of eye movement latency to set upper limits for exposure intervals seems questionable because latency does not index the total time (minimally, 200 msec.) required to obtain information through an eye movement. The foregoing requirement, however, is only one consideration in selection of an exposure time. Since covert encoding processes can only function while the stimulus is on and during the after-stimulation, duration of exposure delimits the operating time of these processes. Choice of an interval, therefore, should establish the setting required to study those aspects of covert scanning of experimental interest.