Families with Identical Twins Discordant for Schizophrenia

Abstract

Recent clinical studies of families with schizophrenic offspring have reported a variety of abnormalities, some of which—such as abnormalities of individual development, family roles and cognitive processes—appear to relate to the development of schizophrenia in a given child. The precise nature and mechanism of these possible relationships, however, have not yet been definitively established. It is to this end that we have been studying a series of families with identical twins discordant for schizophrenia. Previous reports have described the sample, methodology, and findings with regard to life history differences between the schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic twins (Pollin et al., 1965, 1966), biological variables (Stabenau et al., 1968, 1969; Stabenau and Pollin, 1967b, 1968a), parental illness (Guggenheim et al., 1969), and the interaction of constitutional and psychological variables (Pollin and Stabenau, 1967, 1968, and Stabenau and Pollin, 1967a). This paper describes an attempt to further clarify the relationships among four variables in our sample of families: (a) psychopathology; (b) identification; (c) thinking and ‘cognitive’ style; and (d) dominance-submissiveness.