Relationship between schizophrenic thinking and MMPI for process and reactive patients.

This study examined the relationship between Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST) and MMPI performance in 25 male Process and Reactive schizophrenic inpatients. The results demonstrated a correlation between the WIST index and the Sc scale of the MMPI (r = .54, p less than .05) for Process patients only. Other MMPI scales highly correlated with each other also correlated with WIST index for the Process group. The lack of association between WIST and MMPI scales for Reactive patients was interpreted as suggesting a high degree of behavioral disorganization in these patients. Other results, i.e., lack of correlation between time and error scores on the WIST and high variability of time scores on the WIST, suggest that part of this disorganization for the Reactive patients may be understood in terms of disrupted pacing of behavior with respect to time, a process that may be related to the intrusion of irrelevant event processing.