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One of the central purposes of cross-cultural psychiatry is to scrutinize the sociocultural influences on the phenomenology of psychiatric diseases. On the other hand it is possible to lay bare a nucleus of symptoms, common to all cultures, which, independently of all influences, occupies a central position for an understanding of the disease considered. In this study an attempt was made to approach this problem by means of investigating the contents of delusion of schizophrenic patients in Austria and Pakistan. The contents of delusion among 126 Austrian and 108 Pakistani patients diagnosed as having schizophrenia according to DSM-III-R (art. 295) were compared following the classification of Huber and Gross. Additionally the kind of persecution and the type of the persecutor were registered. However it appeared that only a few contents of delusion are frequent in both countries. In both countries persecution was the most frequently mentioned content of delusion. The comparison of the contents of delusion revealed significantly higher frequencies of delusions of grandeur, guilt and religious delusions in Austrian patients. Significant differences could also be found with the kind of persecution and the persecutor's type. Cultural factors seem to have a decisive influence on shaping the contents of delusion.

Functional psychosis has only rarely been described in context with extreme stressors, most studies focusing singularly on posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. We report for the first time the case histories of 2 patients suffering from Capgras syndrome along with schizoaffective disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder after prior experience of prolonged torture. Interaction of personal life experience and psychiatric disorder are proposed as factors resulting in persistent changes in perception and affect.

This report describes the application of a unified biosocial model of personality developed by C.R. Cloninger to a sample of families identified through a proband with schizophrenia and a sample of controls. Families of schizophrenic patients were ascertained in USA and Austria. We could detect differences between females and males in their response to positive reinforcement (Reward Dependence) and differences between young and old people with respect to the response to new and/or exciting situations (Novelty Seeking). In general, results obtained for individuals from schizophrenia families and controls were similar. These results are not substantially influenced by psychiatric disorders in individuals. Psychiatric diagnosis may have an influence on the third dimension of Cloninger's model, designated Harm Avoidance. Analysis showed that patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or from the schizophrenia spectrum try harder to avoid punishment or aversive stimuli than family members with another psychiatric disorder or without a psychiatric diagnosis as well as controls. The results are promising and further research is needed to evaluate the structure of the proposed personality model in families and the relationship of personality to psychiatric status.

In a symptom-oriented study 17 patients suffering from chronic auditory hallucinations were investigated by means of 99mTc-HMPAO-SPECT and compared with healthy controls. The results confirm the relative frontal hypoactivity in junction with a relative hyperactivity in the basal ganglia and mesial limbic structures in both hemispheres found in a previous pilot study in auditorily hallucinating patients. Our results should fortify the symptom-oriented approach in psychiatric research.

We investigated 37 chronic schizophrenic patients with two objective rating scales (AMDP and Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale; BPRS) and compared the questioned symptoms with the Frankfurter Beschwerde Fragebogen (FBF), a questionnaire for subjective complaints which are close to the uncharacteristic 'basic' symptoms of schizophrenic patients. It was pointed out that the questions in the FBF relate mainly to uncharacteristic symptoms like disturbances of perception, concentration, attention, perceiving, and memory. These subjective symptoms of the FBF show a few correlations with the AMDP/BPRS rating. The total score of the FBF gave no further information about social functioning of patients with cognitive disturbances.