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The authors hypothesized that at-risk individuals identified on the basis of their Chapman scale scores would be diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders at follow-up. In the present study, the authors interviewed 135 young adults approximately 5 years following their initial assessment. The at-risk groups included high scorers on the Perceptual Aberration and/or Magical Ideation Scales (n = 59) and high scorers on the revised Social Anhedonia Scale (n = 32). The control participants (n = 44) scored below 0.5 SD of the same-sex group means on all the scales. At the follow-up, the groups differed in terms of their likelihood of having a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. [chi square](2) = 9.79, p < .01. The at-risk groups reported more frequent and severe psychotic-like experiences relative to the control group. These findings support the predictive validity of the Chapman psychosis-proneness scales and may enhance the power of early detection efforts.

Recent studies of schizophrenia have suggestedthat thought disorder results from abnormalities in semantic processing. Inthe following pilot study, the cognitive system used for organizing and associatingconcepts was examined using a triadic comparison task. The semantic maps ofschizophrenia patients with high thought disorder (N = 5) werecompared to that of schizophrenia patients with low levels of thought disorder(N = 5) and normal controls (N = 10) with multidimensionalscaling analysis. At initial testing and at retest, patients with high levelsof thought disorder exhibited consistently lower semantic goodness of fitscores and failed to map results of triadic comparisons along well-defineddimensions. Results suggest that thought disorder in schizophrenia is relatedto a disturbance in the organization of semantic networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]