Semantic Differential Uses in Psychiatric Patients

Abstract

Psychiatric research has long been hampered by lack of sophisticated measures of clinical events. The semantic differential is therefore a welcome new tool in the psychiatric kitbag. It was developed by Osgood and his associates (1957), and can essentially be regarded as a limited association technique which readily taps aspects of meaning and attitude. It is adaptable to a great variety of problems, while remaining easy to give and score. Provided one wishes to measure meaning or attitude, and can link one's hypotheses tightly to the outcome of scores on certain concepts and scales, the technique can be extremely valuable. In order to contrast psychiatric disorders one can build up different patterns of meaning for each disorder on concepts crucial to the theories being tested. We can thus obtain a kind of semantic geography for a small region of function which aids our understanding of the disorder in question.