Cognitive-style factors of defensiveness of schizophrenic patients

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of social adaptation of patients with the initial stage of paranoid schizophrenia; mechanisms of psychological defense directed on decreasing anxiety are considered as important forms of adaptation behavior of patients with paranoid schizophrenia; certain features of the cognitive sphere are at the basis of psychological defense. The author calls attention to a brief literature review of views of the nature of these cognitive features. On this evidence in the article they experimentally test a thesis that features of the cognitive-style sphere are the basis of choosing and activization of one or another form of psychological defense of patients with paranoid schizophrenia. This aspect of considering interrelation of a cognitive style and psychological defense is not reflected in domestic and foreign sources.
The author has examined 80 patients with paranoid schizophrenia (with disease duration no more than a year); all the patients were in medicated remission at the moment of examination. For realization of research objectives the author has used psychodiagnostic techniques directed on studying features of defense behavior and characteristics of the cognitive-style sphere. As a result of the carried out research the author has revealed mechanisms of psychological defense prevailing in the structure of defense behavior of patients with paranoid schizophrenia: intellectualization, displacement, regression, compensation. By results of the carried out research, the basis of defense behavior of patients with the diagnosis “schizophrenia, a paranoid form” is a great differentiation and structuredness of information processing at excessive submission to situational factors and subjective difficulty of overcoming their influence; low accuracy of perceptual scanning with difficulties of distinguishing contextual significant signs in a multiple-choice situation, insufficiency of the preliminary analysis of the perceived information; low level of a categorial control.