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R A Sengel

Publications and source records attributed to R A Sengel.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1984

Associative response bias and severity of thought disorder in schizophrenia and mania.

Studied severity of thought disorder related to putative, exaggerated tendency of schizophrenics to respond to associative intrusions. Three groups of patients, paranoid schizophrenics, nonparanoid schizophrenics, and manics, participated in the investigation. The findings were: vulnerability to associative distractors is not specific to schizophrenia; performance deficit is more related to severity of thought disorder than to a specific diagnosis; degree of cognitive impairment was found to negatively influence verbal performance; the three groups of patients manifested equivalent levels of cognitive impairment.

Bipolar Disorder↗
PubMed1983

Convergent and discriminant validity of the WIST.

Tested the ability of the Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST): (1) to distinguish schizophrenics from nonschizophrenics (N = 30); (2) to agree with clinically rated severity of thought disorder; and (3) to correlate with a measure of generalized cognitive deficit. The WIST was not found to discriminate accurately schizophrenics from nonschizophrenics, but was found to agree strongly with the Shipley Institute of Living Scale, a measure of generalized cognitive dysfunction. Finally, clinically rated estimates of schizophrenic thinking (i.e., conceptual disorganization, unusual thought content) failed to predict WIST Index. The WIST appears to be primarily a measure of generalized deficit.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Effects of cueing on immediate and recent memory in schizophrenics.

Most recent studies of recall deficit in schizophrenia have varied the encoding context while the retrieval context has not been varied. Recall of an event, however, is the product of the memory trace and a retrieval cue. In the present study, nonparanoid schizophrenics, paranoid schizophrenics, depressives, and normal controls were presented categorized word lists, matched for difficulty, that were either cued or not cued at recall. Furthermore, recall was examined on a first, immediate trial and on a second, delayed trial after an intervening task. The results indicated that the interval between recall trials produced a differential deficit for both schizophrenic groups relative to depressives and normals. Two possible explanations for this deficit are deficient encoding processes or retroactive interference. The findings indicate that varying the retrieval environment can enhance the recall of schizophrenics and that future studies should manipulate both the encoding context and the retrieval context to determine whether the schizophrenic recall deficit is due primarily to encoding or retrieval dysfunction, or both.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

A graph analysis of the relationship between population density and social pathology.

This article deals with systematic variables--population density and pathological effects--at the level of a community or organizational system. Existing studies of the relationship between population density and social pathology (e.g., mortality, mental illness) in humans have failed to determine a strictly causal relationship between density and pathology in a linear model. They have not established a direct link between density and pathology in a simple two-variable, linear causal approach. Eliminating other variables by statistical control has obscured the conditions of a complex phenomenon. By incorporating socioeconomic variables into a general system model, this paper suggests that the total configuration of social organization, adaptation, previous group experience, and environment determine the effects of population density. Using a method of graph analysis, a model is presented of the relationship between population density and social pathology which has a high degree of isomorphism with the empirical situation.

Adrenocorticotropic Hormone↗