AUTOMATIC VERSUS CONTROLLED SEMANTIC PRIMING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Schizophrenic individuals (n = 31), including paranoid and nonparanoid diagnostic subgroups, and normal controls (n = 20) participated in a semantic priming experiment involving a single-choice lexical decision task. For the automatic priming blocks, a 260-ms stimulus onset async hrony (SOA) was used; for the controlled priming blocks, a 1,000-ms SO A was used. The paranoid subgroup showed significantly less priming th an did the control group. The nonparanoid subgroup showed a decrease i n priming compared with the control group that approached significance ; There was an increased priming effect for the controlled compared wi th the automatic priming condition; this difference was not modulated by participant group. Nonsignificant semantic priming (equal to 0) occ urred only for schizophrenic subgroups and only in automatic priming c onditions.