Reality Monitoring in Mania and Schizophrenia

The Association of Thought Disorder and Performance

Abstract

Manic (N = 20) and schizophrenic (N = 20) patients, equally divided into thought-disordered (TD) and non-thought-disordered (NTD) subgroups were compared to a normal contrast sample (N = 10) on their reality-monitoring ability (i.e., recognition of the source of presentation of information in their memory). It was found that TD manics and TD schizophrenics had different problems in reality monitoring, in that TD schizophrenics had problems in differentiating information that they had said from information that they had thought and TD manics had problems in discriminating information presented by two external sources. In addition to their problems in reality monitoring, TD patients in general had a response bias that, was different from that manifested by normal subjects in both the present and earlier investigations. Normals and NTD patients performed similarly throughout, which indicates that there were no correlations of diagnosis and performance in the absence of thought disorder. The results of the present investigation were related to earlier reports of attentional deficits in manics and controlled information-processing deficits in TD schizophrenics. Finally, a tentative model of schizophrenic speech disorder, incorporating the present data with earlier reports of controlled information deficits, was advanced.