Teaching Self-Instructions to Chronic Schizophrenic Patients: Efficacy and Generalization

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Abstract
Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of teaching chronic schizophrenic patients to verbally regulate their own behaviour by means of self-instructional training. In Experiment 1, self-instructional training on a short-term memory task produced improvements in performance which did not generalize to a second memory task. In Experiment 2 an attempt to enhance generalization by teaching a rehearsal strategy on two different memory tasks produced improvements of performance only on those new tasks that were similar to the teaching tasks. The third experiment compared task-specific and general problem solving self-instructions and showed no differences in the effectiveness of the two methods. Some of the difficulties encountered when teaching self-instructions to the subjects, together with the failure to produce adequate generalization of treatment effects, leave the clinical utility of the procedure uncertain. Before a practical cognitive therapy for chronic schizophrenics can be developed it will be necessary to explore more fully the relationships that exist between the verbal and non-verbal behaviour of these patients.

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