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Conceptual Thinking in Non‐organic Clinical Groups
Author(s) -
LLOYD WYNNE
Publication year - 1967
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1967.tb00511.x
Subject(s) - psychology , sophistication , certainty , test (biology) , developmental psychology , interpretation (philosophy) , flexibility (engineering) , clinical psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , linguistics , statistics , epistemology , mathematics , paleontology , social science , philosophy , sociology , biology
Groups of twenty Depressives, twenty Mixed Neurotics and twenty Controls matched for I.Q., educational background and verbal sophistication were compared on two tests of conceptual usage. Test I (Trist‐Hargreaves) assessed their performance level of conceptualizing, and significant differences occurred between scores of patients and controls. Test II assessed the certainty with which subjects held their inferences made from standard verbal material. On this test Depressives, in spite of being older than Controls, were significantly less certain of their inferences than the other groups, and the controls were the most certain. It is suggested that this score measures one aspect of the ‘over‐flexibility’ or ‘over‐rigidity’ of their conceptualizing ability, and may be directly or indirectly related to their interpretation of other types of verbal material.