Consistency and Reactivation of Word Responses in Different Cases of Mental Illness

Abstract

Two groups of subjects, 32 college students and 72 psychiatric patients, were submitted to a free-word association test with 2 or 4 repeated presentations of the same list of 20 word stimuli. It was demonstrated that: the commonality (frequency) of responses and their repetition measured for each subject gave reliable measurements for the two groups. The correlation between these two parameters was significant. Independent of the state of the subject, a positive correlation between commonality and repetition indicates a continuity between normalcy and mental illness, the absolute value of these two parameters being a measure of a cognitive process.