Impairment of event schema in patients with schizophrenia: examination of script for shopping at supermarket.
The purpose of this study was to examine event schema, the conceptualization of past experience based on script theory, in Japanese patients with schizophrenia. Subjects comprised 25 patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia and 31 normal individuals who gave informed consent. This experiment used three script tasks measuring free recall, frequency judgment, and sequencing of events encountered when shopping at a supermarket. Patients with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than did control subjects on all tasks. In particular, patients committed more errors when judging the events that "occasionally happen" in the frequency judgment task. On the other hand, these patients judged "seldom occurring events" relatively well. Patients with schizophrenia made more errors than normal people in the free recall task. Specifically, patients made more intrusion errors and failed to close scripts. There was a negative correlation between scores the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms and performance on the free recall task. The results of the present study suggest that event schemas (semantic structure) in patients with schizophrenia are impaired which may be associated with positive symptoms and frontal lobe dysfunction.
Matsui
Mié
M
Department of Neuropsychology and Neuropsychiatry, School of Medicine, Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, 2630 Sugitani, Toyama, 930-0194, Japan. mmatsui@ms.toyama-mpu.ac.jp
Sumiyoshi
Tomiki
T
Yuuki
Hiromi
H
Kato
Kanade
K
Kurachi
Masayoshi
M
D000203:Activities of Daily Living / Q000523:psychology*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology; D003702:Delusions / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology; D006212:Hallucinations / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning / Q000502:physiology; D012931:Social Environment; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology