Auditory distraction and thought disorder in chronic schizophrenic inpatients. Evidence for separate contributions by incapacity and poor allocation and a subsyndrome related to the allocation deficit.

This study investigated auditory attentional processes associated with schizophrenic thought disorder. Thirty-five chronically schizophrenic, state hospital inpatients were assessed for thought disorder using the Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders Scale (TLC) and tested in an attentional task. Two measures of attention were derived from the Digit Span Distraction Test (DSDT) (Oltmannns, T.F., Neale, J.M., 1975. Schizophrenic performance when distractors are present: attentional deficit or differential task difficulty. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 84, 205-209), a digit recall task in which distractor digits were interspersed with target digits. The two measures were Distractibility -- the overall inaccuracy of recall -- which measured attentional incapacity, and Distractible Intrusion -- the number of irrelevant digits recalled -- which was developed in this study to separately measure the inability to allocate attentional resources. These two measures predicted thought disorder strongly and independently. Distractibility did not significantly correlate with any TLC subscale. In contrast, Distractible Intrusions correlated with the TLC subscales Distractible Speech, Incoherence, Loss of Goal, and Word Approximations. The present findings suggest that these subtypes may comprise a distinct subsyndrome of thought disorder, characterized by a dysfunctionally low threshold for selecting appropriate speech information, and that an attentional allocation deficit is related to this language dysfunction.

The use of the MMPI-2 for the assessment of depressive and psychotic disorders.

Considering the normative changes incorporated into the MMPI-2 and the introduction of content scales, this study examined its usefulness for the diagnosis and assessment of depression and psychosis in a heterogeneous sample of 264 psychiatric inpatients. We examined the mean group profiles and diagnostic efficiency of single scales at specified cutoff scores for these conditions. We also conducted cross-validated stepwise regression using all the basic and content scales as well as hierarchical regression examining the incremental validity of the basic and content scales. In general, the MMPI-2 profiles were found to be sensitive to group differences and the derived regression equations proved to be stable and fairly good at classification; but single scales were less useful for diagnosis. Changes in norms made the MMPI-2 more specific than the MMPI, and the introduction of new content scales offered considerable additional clinical information and incremental validity.