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T Kucala

Publications and source records attributed to T Kucala.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1979

A note on the pathology of anhedonia.

Tested the hypotheses that anhedonia afflicts only a minority of schizophrenics and is bimodally distributed among them by comparing the Anhedonia scale distributions of schizophrenic and psychiatric control samples (N = 90). Only 45% of the schizophrenics produced scores higher than those characteristic of the controls. While the schizophrenics' distribution appeared to be bimodal, its irregularity precluded a definitive assessment of the bimodality hypothesis. The correlation between age and Anehodina was positive for anhedonics but not for non-anhedonic schizpohrenics or controls; these findings suggest that anhedonia is a mildly progressive disorder among those schizophrenics who experience it.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

The prediction of outcome from anhedonia and process-reactive scales.

Earlier researchers have suggested that the ability of process-reactive measures to predict future adjustment may result from their relationships to the anhedonia dimension. In the present study the abilities of process-reactive and anhedonia measures, independent of one another, to predict rehospitalization data were compared. After anhedonia scores had been partialed out, schizophrenics' process-reactive scores were correlated modestly with length of the patients' next hospitalization and reclassification as nonschizophrenic. No such significant correlations appeared between anhedonia and adjustment measures after process-reactive scores had been partialed out. Among nonschizophrenics, a sizeable correlation between anhedonia and the probability of later diagnosis of schizophrenia appeared, which suggests that anhedonia may be a useful prodromal marker for schizophrenia.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

A comparison of abstractive and nonabstractive deficits in schizophrenics and psychiatric controls.

Chapman and Chapman (Disordered Thought in Schizophrenia, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1973) have suggested that findings of abstract thinking deficits in schizophrenia could be functions of control task artifacts. This paper describes two projects in which the abilities of schizophrenics and psychiatric hospital controls who had been closely matched on a wide variety of vocabulary and nonvocabulary control tasks to perform several types of abstract thinking tasks were compared. No differences on the mean scores of the schizophrenic and control patients appeared on four of five measures used. On the fifth, a logical reasoning test, the schizophrenics were inferior to controls. The results suggest that many of the differences reported earlier between schizophrenics and nonschizophrenics on abstraction tasks may result from the heavy reliance of researchers on vocabulary as a control matching test, and its peculiar resistance to deterioration in schizophrenia. The results also suggest that inability to use logic properly may be.

Adult↗