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C Besche

Publications and source records attributed to C Besche.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Impairment of semantic categorization processes among thought-disordered schizophrenic patients.

OBJECTIVE: To explore semantic categorization strategies in patients with schizophrenia. METHOD: A short-term memory-recognition task that reveals the effects associated with categorization was created and applied to 2 groups of patients with schizophrenia and depression. RESULTS: Only the schizophrenic subgroup with formal thought disorder (measured using Andreasen's Thought, Language, and Communication [TLC] scale) exhibited a deficiency in semantic categorization strategies during the task. CONCLUSION: These results support the hypothesis of the impairment of the processes involved in the processing of contextual information in patients with schizophrenia who suffer from formal thought disorder.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Attribution of intentions to others in people with schizophrenia: a non-verbal exploration with comic strips.

Several clinical and experimental data suggest that some people with schizophrenia have an impaired ability to attribute relevant mental states to other people. We tested this notion in 24 schizophrenic patients and two control groups, who performed a task devised to test understanding of the intentions of nonverbal comic strip characters. Only the schizophrenic subjects with thought and speech disorganization had specific difficulties attributing mental states to others. The findings support cognitive models which postulate a link between planning process disorders and a deficit in mentalizing skills. The hypothesis that the more frequent an action is in everyday life, the more easily it is understood by schizophrenic subjects, is discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Heterogeneity in cognitive functioning of schizophrenic patients evaluated by a lexical decision task.

BACKGROUND: The disorganization pattern in schizophrenia, which involves formal thought disorders, is thought to be correlated with a deficit in integrative processes of contextual information. We tested the hypothesis that thought disordered schizophrenics, unlike non-though disordered schizophrenics, would present a deficit in the processing of the context during a task which involves these integrative processes. METHODS: A group of 22 schizophrenic patients diagnosed in accordance with DSM-III-R criteria and a group of 11 control subjects were compared using a semantic priming version of the lexical decision task. The experimental design used low-level structuration of verbal material to reveal the difficulty that schizophrenic patients encounter in using semantic regularities. RESULTS: A significant difference in priming effect was found between the three groups. Control subjects and non-thought disordered schizophrenics exhibit a priming effect for related word pairs when compared with unrelated pairs (respectively F(1,10) = 17.7; P < 0.002 and f(1,10) = 14.5; P > 0.003) but thought disordered schizophrenics did not (F(1,10) < 1; NS). CONCLUSIONS: This finding provides evidence for the cognitive heterogeneity of schizophrenic subjects. This absence of priming effect in thought-disordered schizophrenic subjects supports the hypothesis that these patients present a deficit in the post-lexical controlled information processing that permits the integration of semantic information.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Syntactic and semantic processing in schizophrenic patients evaluated by lexical-decision tasks.

Two lexical-decision tasks with 500-ms stimulus-onset asynchrony were conducted with 34 schizophrenic patients. This group consisted of 24 schizophrenic patients with thought disorder (TD) and 10 schizophrenic patients without thought disorder (NTD), 14 psychiatric controls (depressive illness), 20 hospitalized controls, and 20 normal controls. One lexical-decision task with semantic relations (related vs. unrelated, Experiment 1) and 1 task with syntactic relations (congruent vs. incongruent; Experiment 2) were used to evaluate processing of different lexical information. In Experiment 1, although all control groups and NTD schizophrenic patients showed semantic priming, TD schizophrenic patients did not. In Experiment 2, all groups showed a significant syntactic effect. These findings provide evidence for an abnormality in semantic processing and the preservation of syntactic processing in TD schizophrenic patients, thus suggesting a deficit in the processing of semantic information under certain conditions when compared with normal syntactic processing.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

[Processing of contextual syntactic information in a decision making task in schizophrenic subjects].

OBJECTIVE: This research report studies how schizophrenic subjects process contextual syntactic information using a double-decision lexical task (deciding whether or not strings of letters form French words). Given the automatic nature of syntax, we are assuming the preservation of syntactical information processing in all the schizophrenic subjects, including those presenting thought disorder (TFP), which we name schizophrenic TPF+. METHOD: Twenty control subjects and 20 schizophrenic subjects (including 10 TFP+ schizophrenic subjects) participated in a double-decision lexical task containing syntactic errors. RESULTS: The results confirm our hypothesis because we show that all subjects (control and schizophrenic) are hampered in recognizing words when they contain grammatical errors. CONCLUSIONS: The results contrast with data on the processing of contextual semantic information by schizophrenic subjects, since the data in the literature conclude that there is an information-processing anomaly on the part of these patients. As a result, our study refutes the hypothesis of a generalized difficulty in the processing context by schizophrenic subjects.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Alexithymia and psychological trauma--analysis of verbal expression of subject with post-traumatic stress disorder: an exploratory study].

The aim of this preliminary study is the analysis of the utterances of subjects suffering from Post-traumatic disorder. The study is based on the recent methods of discourse analysis developed in France by Ghiglione and Blanchet (1991, 1998). We have tried to know how victims of psychical trauma verbalize their different emotional reaction to the traumatic event. We expected to find discursive indicators characteristics of alexithymia when they speak about their emotion associated to traumatic event, that is to say an inhibition of the verbal expression of emotion, a factual, descriptive and objective discourse, a diminution of the personal engagement, difficulties to give explanations about the violent trauma. This study shows that the victims of psychical trauma don't present a lack of verbalization of their emotions but a dissociation in the expression of their emotions. The emotional words are more frequently associated to the symptoms than to the traumatic event that had been at the origin of the symptoms. This dissociation is similar to a particularity of alexithymia as it was described by Sifnéos (1996). The study also shows that the distribution of the discursive indicators in the different themes discussed by the subjects constitutes an interesting way of work needing then the application of experimental and comparative methods.

Adult↗