SOCIAL COGNITION'S ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE OF SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENTS

Abstract

In schizophrenia, all life events become unclear, and with the chronic bourse, patients engage in the use of passive coping strategies as avoidance and soda! withdrawal. Consequently, the cognitive processes that underlie social interactions of these patients must

be studied. Social cognition's attributional style is one of the important factor 1

t should be

considered in the care of patients with schizophrenia. This importance emergeq because social cognition is concerned with the mental processes that involve perceiving, interpreting, and generating responses to the intentions and behaviors of others. As one of the dqmains of social cognition, attributional style which gained a lot of attention, because it ipvolves giving meaning and interpretations for events in order to know why people do what they do in social situations. By definition, attributional style is the way in which one explains the causes for positive and negative outcome of events, and it is composed of three dimensiops: the locus of attribution, stability, and globality. Nurses are in the forefront of those whd have to know about attributional style because they mainly depend on nurse-patient interactions in order to care for patients with schizophrenia. So, it is mandatory for psychiatric nur ing practice to understand the cognitive processes that underlie nurse-patient relationships. I

• The present study aimed at identifying the social cognition's attribJtional style of patients with schizophrenia. 1

The study was conducted at El-Maarnourra Hospital for Psychiatric medicine in Alexandria. The researcher selected one private ward and one gratis ward for j each sex using simple random sampling. Then from these four wards one ward was chosen randomly to determine the order of data collection. As the number of patients who met the tiesearch criteria was not enough in these four wards, therefore, tbe process of ward selection Was repeated so that four other wards were randomly selected, and the number of patients wJ completed. So by the end of the study, eight wards were involved in the process of data collection; four female wards and four male wards (two private and two gratis for each sex). ! • I I The subjects of the study were 150 patients with schizophrenia who were hospitalized for less than six months. The 150 patients included: 106 male patients, and 44 emale patients. I I I The data of this study was obtained using the following tool: I

Part 1: The socio-demographic and clinical data sheet. It was dJeloped by the researcher after thorough review of literature. It included: the demographic arid clinical data, the social data, and the attributional style. This sheet aimed to collect the socio-demographic and clinical data and to identify the attributional style of studied patients. ! i Part II: The Ambiguous Intentions Attribution Questionnaire (AIAQ). The tool was developed by Combs et al (2005). The questionnaire was made to measure the social-cognitive attributional style through capturing the perceived hostility of the attributed intent (The Hostility• Bias HB), the attribution of blame (Blame Score BS), and the tendency of the