Genetics, environment and psychopathology / editors, Sarnoff A. Mednick [and others].
- Date:
- 1974
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Genetics, environment and psychopathology / editors, Sarnoff A. Mednick [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![46 Sarnqff A. Mednick this means of reducing anxiety and the fact that it is automatically self sustaining through secondary reinforcement. Whenever an anxiety producing stimulus presents itself, the individual's anxiety level will momentarily rise. An avoidant associative transition will remove him from the threatening stimulus and result in a reduction in anxiety which will once again reinforce the learned avoidant thinking mechan¬ ism. At this point it is difficult for me to see how this avoidant habit can be extinguished. Most avoidant responses are quite resistant to ex¬ tinction because of their built-in self reinforcement. Sometimes by physically preventing the avoidant response in the presence of the danger signal and omitting the punishment, extinction may be hastened. At the moment, it is difficult to see how an avoidant thought might be physically prevented. One aspect of this explanation should be emphasized. Schizophrenia is here seen as a learned disorder of thought and emotion. The acute phase of the illness in the reactive patient is not in and of itself schizo¬ phrenia. It is the learning of the avoidant thoughts which is the essence of the schizophrenic disorder. Chronicity is a function of the degree to which the patient's thinking is dominated by avoidant thought sequences and I believe that chronicity may best be measured in this manner. [. . .] A proposed research project This orientation to research has provided the background for a series of experiments on learning and thinking in schizophrenia. I have refrained from presenting these to you since the complete explication of the methods of any one might have taken up all of my time. Instead I would like to close with a very brief description of a study we are attempting to carry out at the University of Michigan. In this study we are taking a group of normal individuals and observing them with measures suggested by the theory. Using these measures we will attempt to predict which of them will become schizophrenic. In order to maximize the number of cases of schizophrenic which occur in the group we are testing individuals whose parents have both been hospitalized for schizophrenia. The literature suggests that from 40% to 68% of these individuals will themselves become schizophrenic. If](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18032618_0063.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
