Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:46:39.805Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Semantic Differential Uses in Psychiatric Patients

A Study of Obsessive, Psychopath and Control Inpatients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

I. M. Marks
I. M. Marks*
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, The Maudsley Hospital, London, S.E.5
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Psychiatric research has long been hampered by lack of sophisticated measures of clinical events. The semantic differential is therefore a welcome new tool in the psychiatric kitbag. It was developed by Osgood and his associates (1957), and can essentially be regarded as a limited association technique which readily taps aspects of meaning and attitude. It is adaptable to a great variety of problems, while remaining easy to give and score. Provided one wishes to measure meaning or attitude, and can link one's hypotheses tightly to the outcome of scores on certain concepts and scales, the technique can be extremely valuable. In order to contrast psychiatric disorders one can build up different patterns of meaning for each disorder on concepts crucial to the theories being tested. We can thus obtain a kind of semantic geography for a small region of function which aids our understanding of the disorder in question.

Type
Discussion
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 112 , Issue 490 , September 1966 , pp. 945 - 951
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1966 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arthur, A. Z. (1962). “Delusions: a theoretical, methodological and experimental study.” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of London.Google Scholar
Bandura, A. and Walters, R. H. (1959). Adolescent Aggression, p. 308–309. New York.Google Scholar
Bopp, J. (1955). “A quantitative semantic analysis of word association in schizophrenia”. Unpublished Ph.D., Univ. of Illinois. (Cited by Osgood, et al., 1957).Google Scholar
Cleckley, H. (1955). The Mask of Sanity. (3rd ed.) St. Louis.Google Scholar
Fenichel, O. (1946). The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. p. 38, 273. London.Google Scholar
Fransella, F. (1965). “An experimental evaluation of the Speech Correction Semantic Differential”. Speech Monographs, 32, 448–451.Google Scholar
Hall, J. and Jones, D. C. (1950). “Social grading of occupations”. Brit. J. Socio., 1, 31–55.Google Scholar
Luria, Z. (1959). “A semantic analysis of a normal and a neurotic therapy group”. J. abn. soc. Psychol., 58, 216–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maclean, P. D. (1958). “The limbic system with respect to self-preservation and the preservation of the species”. J. new. ment. Dis., 127, 1–11.Google Scholar
Lazowick, L. M. (1955). “On the nature of identifition”. J. abn. soc. Psychol., 51, 175–183.Google Scholar
Marks, I. M. (1965). Patterns of Meaning in Psychiatric Patients. Maudsley Monograph No. 13. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marks, I. M. Rachman, S. and Gelder, M. G. (1965). “Methods for assessment of aversion treatment in fetishism with masochism”. Behav. Res. Ther., 3, 253–258.Google Scholar
Neuringer, C. (1963). “The effect of intelligence level and neuropsychiatry status on the diversity of intensity of semantic differential ratings”. J. consult. Psychol., 27, 280.Google Scholar
Norman, W. T. (1959). “Stability characteristics of the semantic differential”. Amer. J. Psychol., 72, 581–584 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osgood, C. E. (1962). “The generality of affective meaning systems”. Amer. Psychol., 17, 10–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osgood, C. E. Suci, G. J. and Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The Measurement of Meaning. Univ. of Illinois.Google Scholar
Rado, S. (1959). “Obsessive behaviour—so-called obsessive compulsive neurosis”. In: American Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol. 1. ed. Arieti, Sylvano p. 324–343.Google Scholar
Scott, P. D. (1960). “The treatment of psychopaths”. Brit. med. J., i, 1641–1646.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slater, P. (1965). “The use of the repertory grid technique in the individual case”. Brit. J. Psychiat., 111, 965–975.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.