The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

Discrimination: From 26 reliable variables, 8 were tested for discrimination properties
by 5 studies; there were 4 differences. There were no significant differences between
schizophrenics and controls on absence of focal configuration (56). A similar variable,
omission of essentials, was identified as a strongly significant and frequent predictor of
Alzheimer's disease against normal controls (36) and was distinct from unintelligibility,
in which there was no difference in the same patient group. Between presence of named
elements, people present were drawn more frequently by normal controls than patients
with both depression and organic brain damage (21; this study probably lacks power as
the numbers are very small) and this result is partly supported by similar findings from
a study of depressed patients with a main diagnosis of personality disorder (3, but no
subgroup numbers were given). The findings of study 46, that schizophrenics and other
patients scored equally on countable named elements in pictures also support this
differential score for depression. There were differences between different partitions of
schizophrenic patient groups from study 33, which distinguished duration of psychosis
as long or short and severe from other grades of mental retardation (33), in the use of
inanimate objects, but neither compensation, nor power calculations were made for the
process of multiple testing and unequal numbers.
Summary: Objective thematic evaluation of content is reliable. Normal controls may
draw more people than patients and Alzheimer's patients may omit more essential
elements than both controls and patients. Use of inanimate objects may distinguish
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