Abstract
Rationale: The present study attempted to examine the relationship between attributional style, ‘theory of mind’ ability and episodic memory functioning as an integrated mechanism of psychological abnormalities putatively underpinning a range of psychotic phenomena. Hypotheses: It was hypothesised that there would be a significant relationship between the above cognitive functions in a group of patients expressing predominantly paranoid type symptoms. It was also predicted that episodic memory dysfunction would characterise a group of patients expressing predominantly behavioural signs of schizophrenia. It was also hypothesised that the cognitive functions would be significantly related to an empirically generated ‘subsyndrome’ of illness characterised by paranoid type symptoms. Episodic memory dysfunction was predicted to be highly associated with a subsyndrome of illness characterised by behavioural signs. Design: Clinically homogeneous groups were generated by cluster analysis of a heterogeneous group of schizophrenic patients. Attributional style, ‘theory of mind’ and episodic functioning measures were administered to the groups. Multiple correlations within each group tested the above hypotheses. Secondly, symptom ratings of the initial sample were entered into a factor analysis. The emergent factors were correlated with the psychological performance data of the above measures. Results: Four patient groups were generated from the clustering procedure for further analysis. None of the correlational data provided any support for the hypotheses. Three factors were generated from the factor analysis. ‘Abnormal experiences/thinking’ was significantly related to external-personalising biasing, while against prediction ‘suspiciousness/persecution’ was not related significantly to any performance variable. ‘Negative behavioural signs’ was significantly related to episodic memory dysfunction. Summary/Conclusions: Very little support was recorded for the study’s hypotheses. It was deemed that, although the study was overambitious, it was based on valid theoretical grounds but needed more long term analyses, perhaps using the same design, guaranteeing vastly elevated numbers of patients to test the hypotheses confidently.