Situational feature recognition in schizophrenic outpatients.

Previous research has suggested that patients with schizophrenia are significantly better at identifying relatively concrete features that describe social situations (e.g., actions and roles) than more abstract features (e.g., rules and goals). Because participants in the earlier research were all inpatients, the results may have been confounded by various factors that are commensurate with a hospital stay. Thirty-one patients with DSM-III-R diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 39 normal volunteers completed the Situational Feature Recognition Test to determine whether they also showed the differential deficit. Results showed that the outpatient group was, indeed, less symptomatic than the inpatient group; outpatients also showed better overall feature recognition than inpatients. Schizophrenic outpatients and normal volunteers are significantly better at identifying concrete features than abstract features. Additional analyses suggested that the differential deficit in outpatients is due, in part, to their disorder. Implications for the remediation of social functioning deficits are discussed.