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Speech fundamental frequencies (SFFs) are nonverbal sound frequencies that convey emotion in speech. The degree of SFF long-term averaged spectra (LTAS) convergence between conversants reflects aspects of conversant-reported quality of the interaction (e.g., emotional synchrony). This study investigated whether SFF LTAS convergence between inpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia (n= 20) and an interviewer was associated with severity of illness (SOI), formal speech disturbance (FSD), and stress reactivity of FSD. Participants provided speech samples describing stressful and nonstressful life experiences. In the stress condition, SFF LTAS was negatively correlated with SOI and FSD. Moreover, patients exhibiting stress reactivity of FSD also evidenced stress reactivity of SFF LTAS. These findings suggest that the emotional and verbal contents of speech are disrupted by stress in schizophrenia, and SOI is associated with FSD and reduced emotional communication during stressful conditions. The interaction between stress reactivity of FSD and SFF LTAS supports the construct validity of a reactivity dimension in schizophrenia.

Theory of mind (ToM) is an aspect of social cognition that refers to the ability to make inferences about the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people. It is believed to be related to social functioning. Previous investigations of ToM in schizotypy have yielded mixed results. Using a correlational approach, the present study explored the relationship between schizotypal traits, ToM, neurocognition, depressed mood, and social functioning in a sample of 50 undergraduate students. Schizotypy was related to poor social functioning. Contrary to predictions, schizotypal traits were not associated with impaired ToM. In fact, schizotypal traits were associated with enhanced performance on a ToM task that involved detection of ironic statements. However, strong relationships emerged among schizotypy, depressed mood, and social functioning, highlighting the need to also examine depression when assessing the relations between elevated schizotypy and poor social functioning.

Studies have found higher levels of alexithymia in schizophrenic subjects relative to controls, with an overall higher level of emotional arousal and social withdrawal. The present study is an extension of this research to the assessment of schizotypy in a nonclinical sample. Seventy-two undergraduate students (40 female; 21.6 ± 6.38 years) were recruited to participate in this study. Consistent with earlier research, our results show that both schizotypy and alexithymia are associated with relatively poor socioemotional functioning across the variables of depression, anxiety, social functioning, and overall quality of life. Further, our results show that the significant associations found between alexithymia and these 4 outcome variables was predicated on shared variance with schizotypy. When both alexithymia and schizotypy were regressed onto these variables as independent predictors, the contribution of alexithymia was consistently nonsignificant. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of hypothesized substrates of alexithymia.

Over the past 50 years, parents have become more involved in the care of their schizophrenic sons and daughters. Although such responsibility can be gratifying, parents frequently report feeling burdened and distressed. These feelings may affect parents’ coping strategies in times of stress. This study examined the effects of family history of psychosis on coping styles in parents of patients. Coping strategies of parents with and without additional first-degree relatives suffering from psychosis (besides the index son or daughter) and controls were compared. As predicted, more family history of psychosis was negatively related to coping ability in parents. Findings suggest that greater familial exposure to psychosis may have an adverse effect on their ability to deal with life stressors. Results are discussed in light of the possible influence of genetic and environmental factors.

Schizophrenia is generally viewed as a disruption of normal functioning because of an underlying core illness. A number of theorists have speculated that this core illness may unilaterally disrupt normal personality functioning. However, recent data suggests that the relationship may be more complex and reciprocal than previously conceptualized. Furthermore, basic personality characteristics appear to be associated with numerous clinical phenomena. This article reviews the empirical literature pertaining to normal personality characteristics structured around the five-factor model (FFM) of personality in individuals with schizophrenia. Evidence suggests that certain personality characteristics may be uniquely related to the etiology of psychosis, as well as symptom severity, occupational functioning, cigarette smoking, substance use and violent behavior, social isolation, and suicidality in patients with schizophrenia. The implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Speech disorder exacerbates when negative affect is aroused in patients with schizophrenia. However, little is known about the effects of positive affect on speech disorder. A well-validated laboratory procedure was used to determine whether arousal of positive affect would modulate speech disorder in 57 stable outpatients with schizophrenia and 48 community controls. Overall, the level of speech disorder modulation was negligible for both groups, although there was considerable variability in whether patients’ speech disorder exacerbated or ameliorated. Results suggest that arousal of positive affect has an ameliorative effect on speech disorder for certain patients who have relatively severe symptomatology.

There is indirect evidence to suggest that a subgroup of patients with schizophrenia exhibit a diminished capacity to experience both positive and negative emotions. To date however, no studies have focused specifically on this diminished emotionality (DE). The main objective of the present project was to determine whether patients with self-reported DE differed from other patients in level of social functioning, physical and social anhedonia, and negative/deficit symptoms. Seventy-three state hospital patients with DSM-IV diagnosed schizophrenia and 22 nonpsychiatric controls were examined. Results provided mixed support for the present hypotheses. Patients with self-reported DE (N10) versus those without (N63) had poorer social functioning, similar levels of physical and social anhedonia, and significantly less severe negative/deficit symptoms. Moreover, there was a substantial amount of discrepancy between patients’ self-reported levels of emotionality and the ratings of their emotionality as made by trained observers. Implications of these results are discussed.

A new task was developed to examine source monitoring in 52 patients with schizophrenia. Patients and nonpsychiatric controls were not found to differ on recognition memory, source discrimination, or attribution bias when the between group difference in IQ was controlled. However, among patients, source discrimination was significantly related to severity of thought disorder. After controlling for IQ and verbal working memory, thought-disordered patients were significantly poorer than nonthought-disordered patients at discriminating the source of previously presented information. Results suggest that internal source monitoring is specifically related to thought disorder in patients with schizophrenia.

Relatives of schizophrenia patients have demonstrated several different types of subtle communication disturbances. This study used twin methodology to address the question of whether certain of these disturbances might be reflective of genetic vulnerability. Verbatim interviews from a sample of monozygotic and dizygotic twins in which at least one member of each twin pair had a diagnosis of schizophrenia were rated for three different types of referential communication disturbances. Monozygotic versus dizygotic nonschizophrenic co-twins were compared on each type of disturbance. Associations between the language variables and object sorting test performance also were examined. Differences among subjects in levels of global psychopathology were controlled. Schizophrenic participants showed higher levels of communication disturbance than nonschizophrenic co-twins. One type of communication failure, the "missing information" reference, discriminated monozygotic from dizygotic nonschizophrenic co-twins. This type of failure was associated with specific types of errors on the object sorting test. These findings suggest that missing information references may be an expression of schizophrenia-related genetic vulnerability.

Parents of schizophrenic patients have demonstrated subtle disturbances of thought, language, and communication. The etiologic relevance of these disturbances is not clear. This study assessed levels of referential communication disturbance in the "natural speech" of schizophrenic patients, nonschizophrenic parents of patients, and control subjects matched to the patients' parents and tested for associations of communication disturbances in parents with family history of psychosis and with schizotypy scale scores. The speech of the patients' parents as a group contained high frequencies of referential failures. Those parents with first-degree family histories of psychosis and/or high schizotypy scale scores made more frequent referential failures than the rest of the parents. Family history was particularly highly associated with failures involving language structural breakdown. The results of this study suggest that referential disturbances in parents of patients may be related to genetic liability in the parents. However, such an effect does not appear to account fully for the sizable differences between parents and controls in levels of communication disturbance.

This article reviews the empirical literature on cognition and communication in the parents of schizophrenic patients to address the questions of whether these parents as a group show evidence of any distinguishing cognitive characteristics and, if so, what those characteristics might be. Included in the review are studies of thought and communication disorder, and psychometric studies of cognitive functioning. We included only those that used reliable measures and included control groups in their designs. Taken together, the findings provide substantial evidence that nonschizophrenic parents of schizophrenic patients as a group demonstrate subtle cognitive difficulties in the area of concept formation and maintenance. There are also indications of other cognitive anomalies that will require further study. We discuss the importance of clarifying the etiological relevance of these findings and of pursuing further research in this area.

Evidence from naturalistic and laboratory studies indicates that schizophrenic symptoms are exacerbated by stress or arousal of negative affect in some patients and not in others. Affective reactivity of symptoms may reflect a pathophysiological process or set of processes present only in a subset of cases of schizophrenia and, therefore, may constitute a dimension potentially relevant to subtyping efforts aimed at discriminating separate processes within the disorder. This paper reviews the evidence a) that affective reactivity of symptoms exists in some but not all schizophrenic patients, b) that this dimension corresponds with other variables that also are putative process discriminators, and c) that it is associated with a more global pathological reactivity to sensory and affective stimuli. Hypotheses as to its biological substrata, relevance to treatment, and importance to larger diagnostic issues are discussed.

Singer and Wynne's measures of communication deviance were adapted for use with conversational speech and applied to audiotaped speech samples of schizophrenic patients, their parents, and matched nonpsychiatric control subjects. The parents demonstrated levels of language disturbance similar to those of the patients and higher than those of controls. Language deviance in the parents was positively associated with distractibility on a matched-task digit-span measure of attention and with severity scores on a separate schizotypy scale. These findings are discussed with respect to possible cognitive variables underlying the language disturbances and their potential relevance to schizophrenic etiology.

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.