Transitivity of Thought in Schizophrenic, Brain Damaged and Alcoholic Patients

Abstract

The nature of logical processing in schizophrenic thought disorder was studied through the transitivity paradigm. Amount of intransitivities present in the preference behavior of schizophrenic, brain damaged and two alcoholic groups compared to normals were determined using tasks that varied systematically along the dimension of verbal content. Four types of stimuli in order of decreasing verbal content employed in the study were: statements, named colors, unnamed colors, and musical chords. Schizophrenics were found to be lower overall in transitivity with differences between the schizophrenic and the normal groups increasing as verbal content increased in the stimuli. Differences between the schizophrenic and other groups were least when the preference task had the lowest verbal content. This suggests that the logical system of schizophrenics is not impaired equally for all contents of thought.