Aim: The article presented results of a research designed to compare the feeling of guilt in healthy adults and in persons diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Method: One hundred people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia participated in the research and 100 people without diagnosed psychopathology (control group).
Results: The findings of the research showed that the persons from the clinical group obtained much higher results in all the tests measuring a sense of guilt and that interpersonal guilt in persons suffering from paranoid schizophrenia in a majority of cases significantly is not correlated with clinical symptoms - thus it can be assessed in a relatively independent manner from a patient's behaviour and cognitive state. However, it has been proved that the strongest indications of positive symptoms of schizophrenia are: Sense of guilt related to helplessness (IGQ), Sense of guilt related to induced self-hate (IGQ), Guilt as a state (GI) and Guilt as a feature (GI), whereas indicators of negative symptoms and a general result--Guilt as a state (GI).
Conclusion: One might suppose that such a pattern of results indicates the primacy of a characteristic (guilt as a characteristic according to the Inventory of a Sense of Guilt), which is proved by a lack of correlation between schizophrenia symptoms (being more of a state nature) and the most important dimensions of the sense of guilt (being more of a characteristic nature). Moreover, the research results give grounds to confirm the existence of significant differences in the intensity of the experienced sense of guilt (Guilt as a state and Sense of guilt related to induced self-hate guilt) among outpatients and all-day treatment patients.