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Content Analysis of Speech of Schizophrenic and Control Adoptees and Their Relatives: Preliminary Results
Abstract
Speech samples were collected on 20 Danish schizophrenic adoptees, along with 26 control adoptees and their respective biological and adoptive relatives. Typewritten transcripts of these speech samples were scored using the Gottschalk-Gleser Social Alienation-Personal Disorganization (SA-PD), or "Schizophrenic', content analysis scale. Both mean scale scores and the proportion of subjects with extremely high (i.e. deviant) scores were significantly higher in schizophrenic adoptees than in either (a) subjects with no psychiatric disorder or (b) the sample with psychiatric disorders other than schizophrenia. The proportion of deviant scores was also notably high among subjects who, though not schizophrenic, had schizotypal features on the SADS-L interview. Scores were particularly high in schizophrenic adoptees who had a biological parent or sibling with schizophrenia or schizotypal features. By contrast, scores of 29 adoptive relatives of the schizophrenic probands were quite low. The present study appears to corroborate the results of previous studies done in the U.S.A. and Great Britain which suggest that high scores on the SA-PD scale tend to characterize those schizophrenics for whom genetic liability appears to be strongest.
In The Measurement of Psychological States Through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior [1], authors Gottschalk and Gleser thoroughly discussed the theoretical bases for qualifying and quantifying psychological states through content analysis of speech. They outlined their theoretical approaches to content analysis in general, the method of eliciting verbal behavior, and the effect of the method of elicitation used on the data obtained, assessing intensity, scale development, and validation. While providing a detailed description of their theories concerning the measurement of anxiety, hostility, and social alienation/personal disorganization, they also supplied guidelines on how to develop procedures for measuring other psychological states from verbal samples.
The Gottschalk-Gleser-analysis, a content-analytical technique, measures anxious and aggressive affects. For decades this technique was primarily and widely implemented in psychosomatic research. Today, this technique is offered in numerous languages. Since this technique is time consuming in application and analysis, computer software has been developed for English (Psychiatric Content Analysis and Diagnosis, PCAD 2000) as well as for German contents (Dresdner Angstworterbuch, DAW). This study compares the anxiety scale of both versions in order to evaluate their comparability in cross-cultural psychosomatic studies. The English and German version of 96 different abstracts of the German Journal for Psychotherapy, Psychosomatic Medicine and Medicine Psychology from 2003 and 2004 with a total of 31 000 words were compared. The scores of the Gottschalk-Gleser anxiety scales of both computer programs correlates between 0.21 and 0.59 (p Language: de
The capacity of anxiety and hostility outward scores derived from the content analysis of 5-minute speech samples from the relatives of patients to predict relapse or nonrelapse was tested in three distinct groups of schizophrenic patients. Significantly correct predictions were made which compared favorably to the predictive capacity of ratings obtained by means of the Camberwell Family Interview. The latter requires 1 to 2 hours to administer and about 1 hour to score, whereas the former method requires a tape-recorded 5-minute speech sample and up to 0.5 hour to score.
The language capacity of modern humans is thought by some to be clearly distinct from that of nonhuman primates (Bickerton
1990). Crow (1997, 1998a) has proposed that a disturbance in the uniquely human aspects of language is central to the genetic etiology of schizophrenia.
A review of the literature on language disorder in schizophrenia provides evidence for widespread deficits in comprehension,
production, attention, and cerebral lateralization of language. We focused here on those anomalies that are uniquely human
aspects of language. Bickerton's five distinctly human language devices were examined in patients with schizophrenia and their
families by using a structured scoring format on oral soliloquies. The chronic patients showed reduced use of clausal embedding
and used fewer words than first episode patients or well family members. The amount of sentence complexity was found to be
familial and to cosegregate with schizophrenia within families. These data are consistent with previous literature and additionally
show a familial component to these measures, thus suggesting that deficits in specifically human aspects of language may be
related to the genetics of schizophrenia.
Studies using self-report rating scales suggest a considerable overlap regarding symptom complaints in patients with fibromyalgia (FM) and functional dyspepsia (FD), while clinical assessments point to important psychological differences.
To test the hypothesis that measurement of psychological state by means of content analysis of speech will demonstrate differentiation between the two patient groups and between patients with these disorders and age-matched population-based random sample controls.
The Giessener Symptom Complaints Checklist assessed somatic complaints. The computerised Gottschalk-Gleser content analysis method assessed psychological state in 42 females with FM, 17 females with FD and 48 population-based, randomly selected control subjects.
FM patients score higher on mutilation anxiety than FD and control subjects. FD patients had the highest score for death anxiety. Mutilation anxiety and low hope score identified FM patients (sensitivity 68%, specificity 81%, overall classification 75%), but only 19% of the variation in total somatic complaints could be predicted from these or other psychological state scores. In FD patients, however, death anxiety explained 59% of the variance in gastrointestinal complaints.
Psychological state was differentiated among the three groups. Mutilation anxiety may be a psychological marker of an underlying neurobiological vulnerability for FM or may represent a secondary long-term consequence of chronic illness. In FD, death anxiety is directly related to symptom complaints, suggesting a stronger etiological association between emotions and somatic complaints in this disorder.
The present study was designed to determine whether formal thought disorder is less or more heritable than the global diagnosis of schizophrenia, and to examine relations among formal thought disorder and psychiatric diagnosis, stage of illness, and severity of psychiatric history. Interviews recorded in the Gottesman-Shields twin series (17 pairs of identical twins, 14 pairs of fraternal same-sex twins, and 12 unpaired twins) were assessed for the presence and severity of formal thought disorder, using a modified version of the Scale for the Assessment of Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders. No evidence of genetic influence on thought disorder was found. A factor analysis of the thought disorder scales revealed two interpretable factors reflecting verbosity and discontinuities in the form of speech. Scales with high loadings on the verbosity factor showed signs of familial influence and were significantly correlated with severity of psychiatric history. Scales with high loadings on the discontinuity factor were associated with the florid psychotic phase of illness.
Two decades have passed since the inception of the Duke studies in schizophrenia. The passage of time provides a vantage point from which to evaluate that ten year period of research, and to record, in the light of subsequent investigations, the extent to which the fmdings of that project can be viewed as stable or unreliable.
Comparison of 17 different scores, obtained with the Gottschalk-Gleser content analysis scales, with norms for White and Black children has now been made easily possible by the development of two types of profile forms. The scores derived by this method are transformed by plotting them, on a grid, to standard scores. Form 1 provides a nonlinear transformation that does correct for skewness of the score distribution. Form 2 provides a linear transformation that does not correct for skewness. These forms can be used to examine patterns and trends pictorially in psychological state or trait scores derived from speech by this method.
A crucial problem in psychiatry, affecting clinical work as well as research, is the generally low reliability of current psychiatric diagnostic procedures. This article describes the development and initial reliability studies of a set of specific diagnostic criteria for a selected group of functional psychiatric disorders, the Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC). The RDC are being widely used to study a variety of research issues, particularly those related to genetics, psychobiology of selected mental disorders, and treatment outcome. The data presented here indicate high reliability for diagnostic judgments made using these criteria.
In a sample of 5483 adults who had been legally adopted early in life by persons not biologically related to them, 33 were identified, from mental hospital records for whom a diagnosis of definite schizophrenia (chronic, latent, or acute) could be agreed upon by four raters. An equal number of matched controls were selected from the sample of adopted individuals who had never been admitted to a mental hospital. Ninety percent of the living parents, siblings, and half-siblings, biological and adoptive, cooperated in an extensive psychiatric interview permitting a consensus diagnosis by three blind raters. Schizophrenia and uncertain schizophrenia were found to be significantly concentrated in the population genetically related to the schizophrenic adoptees. Their adoptive relatives did not differ from the control populations in the prevalence of schizophrenic illness.
In a number of previous investigations, eye tracking dysfunctions had been reliably found in from 50% to 85% of schizophrenic patients, about 40% of manic-depressive patients, and about 8% of the normal population. We report similar smooth pursuit eye movement dysfunctions in 34% of the parents (or 55% of parental pairs) of schizophrenic patients compared with 10% of the parents (or 7% of parental pairs) of manic-depressive patients. Parental eye movement dysfunctions are significantly related to the diagnosis of the patient and not to the patient's eye tracking performance. These data suggest that, in the absence of other CNS disease, these eye tracking dysfunctions represent familial markers of vulnerability to schizophrenia.
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