Elsevier

Psychiatry Research

Volume 57, Issue 2, 28 July 1995, Pages 155-167
Psychiatry Research

Article
Schizophrenic patients' perceptions of their relatives' attitudes

https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-1781(95)02598-QGet rights and content

Abstract

Although the attitudes of family members as revealed by measures of expressed emotion (EE) have been shown to be associated with the course of schizophrenic illness, little is known about how patients perceive these attitudes. A detailed interview was used to assess patients' perceptions of their family members' behaviors toward them. Family members' EE was assessed with the Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS). Overall, patients' perceptions of criticism were congruent with a component of the FMSS-EE that measures criticism. Results indicated that when family members had high EE/critical scores, patients perceived them as displaying more instances of critical behavior. All cases in which patients' perceptions of criticism were incongruent with measures of FMSS-EE occurred among ethnic minority group members. Although the FMSS-EE did not predict outcome in this study, patients who perceived their relatives as higher in criticism had more negative outcomes at 1 year. These findings suggest that when family environments are examined in patients from ethnic minority groups, the patient's perspective may be a more potent predictor of outcome than traditional measures of EE.

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      Although we found these favorable results on BDSEE's convergent validity, as expected, we should critically note that all BDSEE subscales showed further significant correlations with DRS, FACES, and POTS. As evidenced in true EE [8,43] and perceived criticism [3,34], our results on BDSEE's divergent validity showed that perceived EE was not simply serving as a proxy of adverse effects of the illness because perceived EE was not associated with the duration of BED. Except for the association between perceived warmth and SES, BDSEE subscales were unrelated to socio-demographic and clinical variables of adolescent and mother.

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