Dept. of Neuropsychology, Ruhr-University of Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany.
Psychiatry Res. 2009 Dec 30;170(2-3):132-9. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2009.01.026. Epub 2009 Nov 10.
The study aimed to investigate the pattern of proverb comprehension impairment and its relationship to proverb familiarity and executive dysfunction in schizophrenia. To assess the specificity of the impairment pattern to schizophrenia, alcohol-dependent patients were included as a psychiatric comparison group, as deficits of executive function and theory of mind as well as dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex, which have been related to proverb comprehension difficulties, are common in both disorders. Twenty-four schizophrenia patients, 20 alcohol-dependent patients and 34 healthy controls were administered a multiple-choice proverb interpretation task incorporating ratings of subjective familiarity and measures of executive function. Schizophrenia patients chose the correct abstract and meaningful interpretations less frequently and instead chose the incorrect concrete (both meaningless and meaningful) proverb interpretations more often than alcohol-dependent patients and healthy controls. Relative to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients also chose more abstract-meaningless response alternatives and were impaired in all executive domains. Impaired divided attention was most consistently associated with proverb interpretation deficits in both patient groups. Taken together, schizophrenia patients showed a specific pattern of proverb comprehension impairments related to executive dysfunction and symptoms. The comparison with the alcohol-dependent subgroup suggests that a more comprehensive and severe impairment of complex higher-order cognitive functions including executive behavioural control and non-literal language comprehension might be associated with frontal dysfunction in schizophrenia as compared to alcohol use disorder.
本研究旨在探究精神分裂症患者在谚语理解方面的障碍模式，及其与谚语熟悉度和执行功能障碍之间的关系。为了评估损伤模式对精神分裂症的特异性，我们将酒精依赖患者纳入精神科对照组，因为执行功能和心理理论的缺陷以及与谚语理解困难相关的前额叶皮层功能障碍，在这两种疾病中都很常见。我们对 24 名精神分裂症患者、20 名酒精依赖患者和 34 名健康对照组进行了多项选择谚语解释任务，该任务包括对主观熟悉度的评分和执行功能的测量。与酒精依赖患者和健康对照组相比，精神分裂症患者选择正确的抽象和有意义的解释的频率较低，而选择错误的具体（无意义和有意义）谚语解释的频率较高。与健康对照组相比，精神分裂症患者还选择了更多的抽象-无意义的反应选择，并且在所有执行领域都存在障碍。注意力分散受损在两个患者组中与谚语解释缺陷最为一致相关。总之，精神分裂症患者表现出与执行功能障碍和症状相关的特定谚语理解障碍模式。与酒精依赖亚组的比较表明，与酒精使用障碍相比，与前额叶功能障碍相关的更全面和严重的复杂高阶认知功能障碍，包括执行行为控制和非字面语言理解，可能与精神分裂症有关。
