Assessing Personality and Cognitive Psychopathology in Psychiatric Patients

Abstract

In the present study, we focused on the dimension of psychoticism (P), deriving from Eysenckian theory, on which cognitive psychopathology can presumably be mapped. In particular, we looked at one side of this continuum, ranging between the affective disorders, through paranoid schizophrenia to schizophrenia, exploring hypothesized differences in both P as well as in measures assessing syncretic and symbolic thinking. Schizophrenics were indeed found to score high on P; but an even better differentiation was found when scores on the Lie Scale (L) were also inspected. A clear partition of the bivariate P-L plane was apparent, with a marked differentiation between the paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenics, and with the manic depressives lying in between, in line with the Eysenckian hypothesis.