Date of Award

10-1-1991

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Reality monitoring is a postulated cognitive process by which memories for sensation-based or "real" events are differentiated from memories for thoughts or imagination-based events. Past research indicates that when there is uncertainty about the source of memories (whether sensation or imagination), normal male adults are biased and tend to report an imaginal origin ("I must have thought it."). In contrast, male subjects diagnosed with schizophrenia who also exhibit psychotic speech or thought disorder, reportedly are biased toward reporting a sensation-based origin for uncertain memories ("I must have said it."). In order to further explore the relationship between different kinds of schizophrenia, distress level and reality monitoring, twelve schizophrenic subjects with positive symptoms, twelve schizophrenic subjects with negative symptoms, twelve bipolar subjects with positive symptoms and twelve non-psychiatric volunteers were matched for age, education, estimated verbal IQ, and social class, and presented with a list of nouns to be repeated out loud (sensation-based memories) or repeated in thought (imagination-based memories). When asked to recall whether the item had been thought or said, normal subjects exhibited the previously identified bias for thought, but only the positive symptom schizophrenic subjects exhibited the bias for said. The contrasting biases were evident even when differences in the level of distress were controlled for in an ANACOVA design.

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