[Intensification of interpersonal sense of guilt in patients with schizophrenia].

AIM: The article presented results of a research designed to compare the feeling of guilt in healthy adults and in persons diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

METHOD: One hundred people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia participated in the research and 100 people without diagnosed psychopathology (control group).

RESULTS

The findings of the research showed that the persons from the clinical group obtained much higher results in all the tests measuring a sense of guilt and that interpersonal guilt in persons suffering from paranoid schizophrenia in a majority of cases significantly is not correlated with clinical symptoms - thus it can be assessed in a relatively independent manner from a patient's behaviour and cognitive state. However, it has been proved that the strongest indications of positive symptoms of schizophrenia are: Sense of guilt related to helplessness (IGQ), Sense of guilt related to induced self-hate (IGQ), Guilt as a state (GI) and Guilt as a feature (GI), whereas indicators of negative symptoms and a general result--Guilt as a state (GI).

CONCLUSION

One might suppose that such a pattern of results indicates the primacy of a characteristic (guilt as a characteristic according to the Inventory of a Sense of Guilt), which is proved by a lack of correlation between schizophrenia symptoms (being more of a state nature) and the most important dimensions of the sense of guilt (being more of a characteristic nature). Moreover, the research results give grounds to confirm the existence of significant differences in the intensity of the experienced sense of guilt (Guilt as a state and Sense of guilt related to induced self-hate guilt) among outpatients and all-day treatment patients.