Associative thinking in schizophrenia: a contextualist approach

Abstract

Explored the question of whether responses that appeared to be highly pathological on the basis of the word association test did indeed reflect an underlying aberrant associative process or whether the associations actually had a greater degree of meaning than was evident from the test (N = 60). Utilizing contextualist techniques designed by the authors, which were analogous to the word association test but yet measured schizophrenic associative thinking in specific contexts that more closely approximated natural language situations, the quality and purposiveness of the schizophrenics' associations were examined. The word association test technique was judged to be inadequate by itself to account for underlying associative processes involved in schizophrenic associative thought disorder. A majority of responses (70% schizophrenic, 81% nonschizophrenic) judged to be pathological on the basis of the word association test alone became meaningful in the context of a sentence created by the Ss to explain purposively their associations. The schizophrenics' experience of a stimulus word and consequent associations to that word became clearer when placed within an appropriate context (i.e., a sentence), rather than examined as isolated semantic features (as in the word association test).