Lexical indicators of anxiety in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Anxiety is a dominant emotion in schizophrenia. It is most often diagnosed by questionnaire-based methods. In this study, it was decided to analyse the utterances of patients with schizophrenia for the occurrence of lexical indicators of anxiety, which are a good predictor of experienced anxiety and lie beyond the subject's control. DESIGN: The indicators most frequently described in the literature and considered to be of the most significant diagnostic value were selected: first-person pronouns and verbs; causal expressions and conjunctions; affirmative and negative particles; and dogmatic expressions. It was assumed that more of these would appear in the utterances of people with schizophrenia than in the utterances of healthy subjects. METHODS: The study was conducted on 130 patients with paranoid schizophrenia and 130 healthy subjects. They were asked to describe five pictures. RESULTS: In all verbal indicators of anxiety (except for negative particles) patients with positive schizophrenia attained the highest values, differing significantly from the results for the control groups. CONCLUSION: This result is consistent with the subject literature, which emphasizes the high level of anxiety in schizophrenia, especially in its first phase, when the generative symptoms of the illness predominate.

Can a Scientist Be a Young, Attractive Woman? The Stereotype of a Scientist and the Lexical Choices of Women and Men.

The question of the conformance of a researcher's features to the stereotype of a scientist is rarely addressed in the context of scientific research. We decided to examine its significance in two experiments involving women and men in which the persons conducting the experiment had features respectively conforming and not conforming to the stereotype of a scientist. Both experiments were carried out on an interactive model and the dependent variables were length of utterance and lexical choices. We chose to use linguistic material because, as classical research shows, it is particularly susceptible to the influence of social context and features of the interlocutor. To operationalise the dependent variable, we used Ertel's Speech Style Quotients. The results of both experiments were found to be significant for context comparisons but non-significant for gender, which confirms the importance of features of the interlocutor in determining utterance length and lexical choices.