Communication deviance

The term was originally introduced by Lyman Wynne and Margaret Singer in 1963 to describe a communication style found among parents who had children with schizophrenia. According to Wynne, people are able to focus their attention and identify meaning from external stimuli beginning with their interactions, particularly with their parents, during their early years of life. In family communication, deviance is present in the way members acknowledge or affirm one another as well as in task performance.

A 2013 meta-analysis reported that communication deviance is highly prevalent in parents of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Another 2000 study have reported significant associations between CD in the parent and thought disorder in the offspring.

But, some research shows that CD may be more likely to be associated with specific cognitive disorganization rather than the criteria of schizophrenia, like DSM-III or DSM-II. Also, findings of CD shows that CD may be associated with children's disorders too, rather than the behavior of preschizophrenic types.

For application purposes: CD has been thought of as a measurement of disorder shown in speech in the subclinical aspect.

However, the mechanisms by which CD impacts on the offspring's cognition are still unknown. Some researchers theorize that, in the case of a high degree of egocentric communication in parents where the sender and the receiver do not speak and listen according to each other's premises, the child develops uncertainty.

The research of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts Lyman Wynne and Theodore Lidz on communication deviance and roles (e.g., pseudo-mutuality, pseudo-hostility, schism and skew) in families of people with schizophrenia also became influential with systems-communications-oriented theorists and therapists.

Signs and symptoms

For individual

When talking to people with CD, it is difficult to follow and make consistent sharing of attention and meaning. The content of patient's speech may be confusing to listeners, making it difficult to build a shared focus of attention. Stability of CD change as one ages; a 2001 study finds little correlation between young people and follow-up CD, while people at a mean age of 32 have a high correlation with follow-up CD.

For parents

Research has shown that when communicating with patients who have CD, patients' parents will use similar odd terms and fail to express a sense of closure in their thought even when they talk to their parents. To be more specific, for children with externalizing, “acting out” or “preschizophrenic” behaviors, the parental CD will be higher in maternal and paternal CD was found to be more significant only in which children with high externalizing behaviors. To be more specific, data analysis shows that a large magnitude (g = .97) is linked between maternal CD and offspring psychotic disorder.