Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find what problems schizophrenic patients have in understanding of inconsistent mixed messages and to investigate the cause of the problems. In Experiment 1, the degree of understanding about inconsistent mixed messages of schizophrenic patients was analyzed. The subjects were 30 schizophrenic patients, 15 with positive symptom and 15 with negative symptom, and 15 normal people. In order to understand the degree of understanding inconsistent mixed messages by subjects, the judgement on state of emotion and the situation of dialog were measured. In Experiment 2, the purpose was to investigate why schizophrenic patients have a difficulty in understanding inconsistent mixed messages. In order to explain the cause of messages understanding difficulty shown in Experiment 1, Experiment 2-A intended to find the possibility of attention deficit. The result was that in the case of positive schizophrenics, the condition in which the attention was inducted increased the degree of understanding more than the condition which had no attention induction. This result suggests that the cause of performance of positive schizophrenics could be due to the selective attention deficit. However, the low understanding of the negative schizophrenics can't be explained by the attention deficit because they didn't show a difference between attention inducting condition and no attention inducting condition. In Experiment 2-B, the possible cause of low performance in negative schizophrenics was investigated in terms of cognitive ability impairment. The experiment condition was a simpler inconsistent task than in Experiment 2- A, in which only the degree of understanding facial expressions was measured. As expected, facial expression understanding of negative schizophrenics as compared with positive schizophrenics, was shown to be low. This tells us that the reasons why schizophrenic patients cannot handle mixed messages are different between two groups of schizophrenic patients. This suggests that in order to increase the degree of patients' communication with inconsistent messages, we may need different approaches depending on each group.