The ice cream stories: A study in normal and psychotic narrations

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Abstract
An adaptation of the Pear Stories study originally undertaken by Chafe and his collaborators (1980) was presented to 22 psychotic patients with discharge diagnoses of schizophrenia and mania, and 25 normal controls. The psychotic and normal populations showed definable differences in encoding strategies. Psychotic narratives evinced defects in narration ranging from serious neologizing, disruptions in syntax, and narrative technique. Normals and psychotics showed some mutually exclusive dysfluencies. The strategies of normals caused them to misperceive certain events. It could not be unambiguously determined whether the psychotics had actually misperceived or whether they had only misencoded. This study does not support theories which claim that psychotics have intact linguistic abilities. It does support theories claiming faulty filtering mechanisms, vulnerability to distraction, and attentional deficits, all of which seem to be referring to the same phenomena.