Measuring Disordered Styles of Thinking

LIDZ ET AL (1958) have called attention to the distorted, irrational modes of thinking and communicating that characterize the family environments of schizophrenic patients. Intensive clinical study of the families of 15 such patients suggested the hypothesis that "these persons are prone to withdraw through altering their internal representations of reality because they have been reared amidst irrationality and intrafamilial systems of communication that distort or deny instrumentally valid interpretations of the environment." Wynne and Singer9,10and Singer and Wynne7,8working with projective tests provided further evidence that family forms and styles of thinking and communicating are related to thought disorder in the offspring. McConaghy (1959), Lidz et al (1962), and Rosman et al (1964), using a scoring system developed by Lovibond (1953), reported that the parents of schizophrenic patients show significantly more evidence of thought disorder than control