Failure to inhibit irrelevant information in non-clinical schizotypal individuals
✍ Scribed by F. Richard Ferraro; Margaret Okerlund
- Book ID
- 101258617
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 496 KB
- Volume
- 52
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0021-9762
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The present study compared negative priming performance in a non-clinical sample of individuals based on their schizotypal personality scale (STA) scores. There were 13 High STA and 19 Low STA individuals. High, but not Low, STA individuals displayed deficient negative priming, replicating previous findings. Converging evidence for this claim was observed in the correlation between negative priming and STA score, r = -.64,p < .01, supporting the notion that individuals with high STA scores exhibit an inability to adequately inhibit irrelevant information. Both groups did not differ on a simple reaction time control task, ruling out the possibility that observed negative priming differences across groups were the result of a simple motor reaction time difference. 0 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The last 10 years has seen an increase in the number of negative priming studies (Dagenbach & Carr, 1994; Dempster & Brainerd, 1995;. According to Neill, Valdes, and Terry (1993, negative priming (operationally defined as slowed responses/lower accuracy to an object if a related object has recently been ignored) has been demonstrated across a wide variety of tasks (e.g., categorization, counting, localization), response types (e.g., manual, vocal) stimulus types (e.g., letters, words, colors) and subject populations (e.g., children, older adults, various clinical populations).
One group that has received much empirical attention recently regarding their negative priming performance has been healthy individuals who score high on paper-and-pencil instruments that measure schizotypal personality traits (Claridge & Broks, 1984). Results from many negative priming studies that have tested schizotypal individuals converge on results from the negative priming literature conducted with chronic schizophrenics. Chronic schizophrenics have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information . Thus, there seems to be a concordance across these two literatures in that the performance of individuals who score high on paper-and-pencil tests of schizotypal personality traits resemble clinical schizophrenics' negative priming performance. This performance concordance is especially true within the negative priming literature (Beech, Baylis, Smithson, &