Is unawareness of psychotic disorder a neurocognitive or psychological defensiveness problem?
We examined whether deficits in attention and perceptual encoding as well as psychological defensiveness were associated with impaired awareness of disorder in schizophrenia. The Scale for Unawareness of Mental Disorder (SUMD) was administered to 52 outpatients with a recent onset of schizophrenia approximately 1-2 months following hospital discharge. Two versions of the Continuous Performance Test (CPT) were used to measure attentional impairment–the Degraded Stimulus CPT (DS-CPT) and a memory-load version (3-7 CPT). Three scales from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory were used as indicators of psychological defensiveness: Scales L (Lie), K (Correction), and R (Repression). The Classification and Regression Tree (CART) program, a nonparametric statistical method, was used to identify relationships among multiple predictor variables and to provide optimal splitting scores for each predictor variable. Different combinations of poor target discrimination (d’) on the 3-7 CP
