[Positive and negative schizophrenic symptoms: a reanalysis of the dichotomous model of schizophrenia].

The positive and negative symptoms were analyzed in 115 schizophrenic patients (DSM-III-R criteria) through correlative and factorial analyses, in order to test the positive-negative hypothesis of schizophrenia. The intercorrelative analysis showed high intercorrelations between negative, but low or no correlations between positive symptoms (excepting delusions with hallucinations), which implies that the group of positive symptoms may represent more than one type of symptom complex. This results were confirmed by factorial analysis which identified three distinct clusters of symptoms: the negative syndrome (affective flattening, alogia, abolition-apathy, and anhedonia-asociality), the disorganizative syndrome (positive formal thought disorder, and attentional impairment) and the positive syndrome (delusions and hallucinations). No inverse relations were observed between positive and negative syndromes. This results no support the bipolar-independence hypothesis of the positive-negative distinction in schizophrenia and they need to be confirmed through external validators.