Background & Objectives: The cognitive processes such as attention, thinking, memory and recall have effective role on the child’s confrontation with daily life problems. The psychological disorders are among those impairments which may severely affect these processes. Researches have shown that schizophrenia can impair children’s cognitive processes to a great extent. The aim of this research was to compare the comprehension, lexical Knowledge, memory and recall in children with schizophrenia, conduct disorder and brain damage.

 Methods: The sample of this causal-comparative research consisted of 80 children (8-13 years old) suffering from schizophrenia, brain damage and conduct disorder as well as a group of healthy ones who were selected from among in and out-patients referring to psychology and neurology wards of Emam Hossein health care center in 2004 (20 subjects in each group). The instruments employed in this research were WISC-R (comprehension, vocabulary, digit span) and Recall Test of Babcoch.

  Results: The one way analysis of variance showed significant differences between the children with schizophrenia, conduct disorder, brain damage and non-patient in comprehension, lexical knowledge, memory and recall (p<0.01). The LSD test showed that comperhension, lexical knowledge, memory and recall in children with schizophrenia were more impaired compared to children with conduct disorder and brain damage. Moreover, comprehension, lexical knowledge and memory in children with conduct disorder were more severely impaired than children with brain damage. However, the recall was better in children with conduct disorder than those with brain damage (p<0.01).

 Conclusion: The results showed that schizophrenic children have comprehension, lexical knowledge, memory and recall more impaired than those suffering from conduct disorder and brain damage. The timely recognition of the cognitive abnormalities seems necessary to have a better diagnosis and choose effective treatment and remedial strategies to cope with them.

Background & Objectives: Clock drawing test is a neuropsychological test and has simple scoring and administration. It is a visual-spatial task and therefore can be useful for assessment of the right parietal lobe, constructional apraxia and executive function in schizophrenia.

Methods: this research was a descriptive-analytical study. The samples of this research were 80 inpatient male persons with schizophrenia in Razi Hospital of Tabriz in the fall of 2007. The sample size was 28 patients that were randomly selected. 28 normal persons that have been matched in age and educational level as comparison group were assessed with the test. The raw data were analyzed by independent t-test and the analyses were done by SPSS13.

Results: The results indicated that there is a significant difference in two groups on two phases of research (p=0.01). In particular, the error scores in group with schizophrenia on two phases were higher than normal group. Furthermore, error scores of group with schizophrenia did not show any difference in the second phase.

Conclusion: On the basis of the results it can be concluded that the clock drawing test can diagnose differentially between persons with schizophrenia and normal population. On the other hand most frequent errors on drawing the test in persons with schizophrenia was the place assignment of numbers in clock face. This failure is due to visual-spatial disorder. Visual-spatial ability is affected by the object centered system and the viewer centered system.      

Background & Objectives: Schizophrenia is a chronic disease with frequent periods of exacerbation & remission which influences all aspects of the patient's life, in a way that the patient never returns to his premorbid life. The goal of this survey is Study of main signs in Schizophrenia patients in Ardabil City.

Methods:�This study was a descriptive-analytic one which was done on all of the patients with schizophrenia admitted in Fatemi & Issar hospitals in 2006. A sample of 100 was selected. To study the main signs of schizophrenia in these patients, a questionnaire was used. To screen the patients with schizophrenia, MMPI test was used. The findings were analyzed by descriptive statistics & through the computer software SPSS. Also a PCA method of factor analysis was used for the hypotheses.

Results:�79 patients were male and the rest female.�The most frequent main sign in these patients was attention deficit, & social withdrawal was at the second place. Also, the most frequent type of schizophrenia was paranoid schizophrenia (44%=44 patients). The most widely used was clozapine.

Conclusion: The findings of this study have a concordance with the results of the last studies about the main signs of schizophrenia & also with DSM-IV & Bluerian & Kreaplian symptoms (except from the perception disorders).

  Background & objectives: Exact diagnosis of mental disorder is important in psychology. With respect to common symptoms in schizophrenia, schizoaffective and bipolar mood, correct diagnosis of these disorders seems to be very difficult. The main goal of this study was to compare the body temperature of schizophrenic, schizoaffective and bipolar mood patients.

  Method: In this descriptive study, 60 schizophrenia, schizoaffective and bipolar mood patients, 20 persons in each group were selected. The patients were interviewed and their body temperature was measured. Finally, the data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA.

  Results: Schizophrenia, schizoaffective, bipolar mood patients had 38.15 ±11.13, 34.8±10.99, and 35.25 ± 9.05 years as a mean, respectively. About 63.3% of individuals had secondary , 15% high school, 16.7% diploma and 5% undergraduate education . About 51.7% of patients had non-governmental job, 8.3% and 40% were employed and jobless, respectively. Among them 45% were single and the rest married. 15% of individuals were admitted once, 25%, twice, 3.3% three times, 20% between 4-10 times and 41.7% frequently. Statistically, there was significant difference between the mean of body temperature in schizophrenia, schizoaffective and bipolar mood patients, (p < 0.001).

  Conclusion: The difference between the body temperature mean in three groups of patients showed that schizoaffective patients were more close to bipolar mood patients, and schizophrenia patients differ in terms of base keeping mean and body temperature balance from two other groups (schizoaffective and bipolar mood).

  Background & objectives: Chronic psychiatric patients not only become inactive members of community but also the heavy costs of their maintenance and rehabilitation burden on society and their family. According to importance of subject, this study aimed to investigate the role of percieved social support in predicting positive and negative syndrome in patients with schizophrenia.

  Methods: In this descriptive-correlational study, 124 patients have been selected among patients with schizophrenia hospitalized in Issar Psychiatric Hospital and Rehabilitation Centers in first 3 mounths of 2014 in Ardabil, Iran and completed Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) and a researcher made demographic checklist. Data were analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficient and multivariate regression analysis on SPSS-16 software and P values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

  Results: The mean age of participants was 36.34±9.09 and their education level was mostly (58%) primary or illiterate. Results showed that there is a negative relationship between patients positive symptoms index and their family, some others and total social support (p<0.01) and also between negative symptoms index and patients friends, some others and total social support (p<0.05). Results of multivariate regression analysis showed that 11% of positive and negative symptom syndrome are explained by percieved social support in patients with schizophrenia (p<0.01).

  Conclusion: Percieved social support has relationship with positive and negative syndrome of patients with schizophrenia and measures to increase resources of social support and promotion of patients percieved social support can be used as an effective intervention by clinicians, patients and their family.