Research Article Summary Schizophrenia affects numerous households every year while also contributing to a significant amount of loss wages here in our society. There are stigmas held by family members of individuals suffering from schizophrenia with some believing that the patient is hopeless while others believe that the symptoms are within the patients’ control. This study was done on a group of Mexican American families here in the U.S. to gauge these stigmas and beliefs and place them in their correct categories. This study was conducted to expand upon research that had been done by previous psychologist to test to see if the correlation between expressed emotion (EE) and the attribution theory (Weisman, Lopez, Karno, & Jenkins). Researchers used prior research that had been done and elaborated upon it using three dimensions: affect toward patient, controllability attributions and level of EE. Researchers sought to test two hypotheses derived from the attribution theory which were: Firstly, researchers hypothesized that high EE family members who were characterized as critical towards their schizophrenic relative would view the illness as more within the patient’s personal control. Such family members were expected to implicate personal characteristics of the patient other than factors related to a legitimate illness. Secondly, researchers sought to prove on the basis of attribution theory, they expected that more relatives viewed patient’s symptomatic behavior as under his or her personal control, the more they would express such feelings of dissatisfaction and anger towards the patient (Weisman at al.)
Independent variables or the variables that received the manipulation were for one the age of the participants. The ages ranged from 18-50. Another independent variable was whether or not the patient lived with a spouse or family members has a patient living with a single family member, a spouse for instance, compared to living in a household of seven people. Participants in this study consisted of 23 high and 23 low EE key relatives of schizophrenic patients drawn from a previous study of EE. All the families surveyed were of a lower socioeconomic status and all the patients met certain criteria. Fifty seven percent of the patients were men (Weisman at. al). Mexican Americans were chosen as the attribution theory was developed in modern psychology and its proposed universality could be shown in this study. A few procedures used to collect data were Expressed