Sergey N. Enikolopov

The article presents an empirical study of sense of humor disorders in patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders. Several parameters of analysis are distinguished: humor recognition, humor preferences and the level of laughing activity. It is showed that patients with schizophrenia are characterized by inability to recognize humor. As soon as patients with schizotypal disorder do recognize humor, this may be used as a diagnostic criterion in clinical practice. Sense of humor in patients with schizophrenia and affective disorders acquires peculiarities which are defined here as preferences of certain cognitive mechanisms and topics of jokes.

Moral emotions play a significant role in human behavior, and yet scholars are not unanimous in defining, differentiating, and measuring the basic moral experiences: shame and guilt. Because of this problem, the theory goes far beyond the empirical research on these emotions.

In this article we analyze the most widely accepted points of view on the difference between guilt and shame; those who espouse each point of view suggest their own assessment tools. Thus, one of the often-used methods, the Test of Self-Conscious Affect-3 (TOSCA-3) (Tangney, Dearing, Wagner, & Gramzow, 2000), is based on a theory that differentiates shame and guilt according to where the negative evaluation of the misbehavior is aimed (at one’s actions or at one’s self). Another widely used questionnaire, the Dimensions of Conscience Questionnaire (DCQ) (Johnson et al., 1987), differentiates these emotions on the basis of whether the event causing them is public or personal.

The latest studies have shown that those methods are not contradictory. In addition, both the TOSCA-3 and the DCQ have their disadvantages; for example, they do not differentiate between emotional and behavioral aspects of guilt and shame. Thus, there is a need to develop a new assessment scale that overcomes these disadvantages. One such scale is the Guilt and Shame Proneness Scale (GASP) (Cohen, Wolf, Panter, & Insko, 2011). The research conducted by its authors has established its reliability and validity, which allow us to consider the GASP as a progressive tool in assessing moral emotions, one that has great theoretical and practical value.

Suicide is a controversial phenomenon that people of different cultures and even of different epochs have had difficulty naming. It used to be an enduring theme of many medical, psychological, philosophical, and moralistic discussions. It is a paradoxical act of ultimate self-destruction, a flight from life to death. To commit suicide is to overcome the fear of personal death and to make a step into nothingness. Such a desperately brave deed requires an abandonment of one's sense of immortality, which we all have, a change of values and worldviews. But if one's suicide attempt proves unsuccessful, the question becomes how to explain to oneself and others one's recent act of self-violence. To discover these explanations, we conducted a study of 319 people, ranging in age from 18 to 25; they were all either students (n = 156) or patients in an emergency toxicology ward (people who had attempted to poison themselves, n = 163). This article summarizes theories of suicidal behavior and of the fear of death together with the ideas of cultural anthropologist E. Becker on these matters and puts suicide into the terror-management perspective. The suicidal act is viewed as a mortality salience, and the hypothesis is that people who deny their recent suicide attempt (n = 33) and who have one (n = 95) or several (n = 35) suicide attempts in their personal history exhibit different terror-management patterns in comparison with each other and with the control group. They fall back on different resources with various degrees of effectiveness. Implications of these results for understanding suicidal and postsuicidal behavior are discussed and suggestions for rehabilitation are made.

Background. At the beginning of 20^thcentury, the phenomenon of oddity began to be studied. It was defined as a set of characteristics responsible for an individual giving the impression of being unusual, odd, and peculiar. Later, psychiatrists integrated oddity into the concept of schizotypy. Yet, while considered a part of the schizotypy construct, oddity has remained singular  and maintained its status as an independent dimension.

Objective.The present article discusses oddity as a set of particular clinical traits that can be evaluated both by self-report measures and clinical assessment. We  set out to investigate the oddity phenomena as manifested in a clinical sample, in order to delineate key features that constitute this concept.

Design. Seventy-one patients were selected according to a specific set of criteria and subjected to a set of self-report measures (the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and the Adult Personality Traits Questionnaire), a clinical interview, and a pathopsychological experiment. A number of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional characteristics were analyzed. An intra-group comparison was carried out in order to clarify the potential differences between the self-reported and clinically assessed phenomenon of oddity.

Results. The study’s first finding was that the SPQ-74 does not identify odd personalities in the general population, as reflected in the fact that the sample’s average scores proved to be low. Secondly, restricted emotionality and a deficit in social interactions proved to be the prevalent characteristics of the sample of “odd” individuals. Furthermore, a set of certain speech peculiarities (word coinage, bizarrerie, etc.) and thinking impairments of various types (distortion of abstraction level and motivational deficit) emerged as prominent characteristics in the majority of subjects. Finally, it was determined that clinical assessment allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of the psychology of odd personalities than self-report measures, due to a number of the personality, temperamental, and cognitive characteristics that the latter tend to exhibit.

Conclusion. “Odd” individuals can be characterized by a number of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral features independent of social perception and relevant to clinical practice; they can be captured more successfully by the application of qualitative methods. Further research is needed to elaborate this set of traits and test this hypothesis on new samples.