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'The concept of overinclusive thinking has been used to describe or account for the thought disorder observed in schizophrenic patients. This is usually defined as an inability to preserve conceptual boundaries perhaps based on a cerebral input dysfunction which causes difficulty in filtering stimuli. This leads the schizophrenic to make remote associations and to overgeneralize or over-abstract.' Recently the concept of overinclusiveness and its theoretical underpinnings have been criticized and the question raised as to whether thought disorder and even Schneiderian first rank symptoms may be observed in manics as well as schizophrenics.
The authors set out to test the hypothesis that in view of the symptoms of flight of ideas, euphoria, and grandiosity, overinclusiveness would be equally common in carefully defined manic and schizophrenic samples. In their study, manic patients tended to demonstrate more overinclusiveness than schizophrenic patients—to a significant degree not due to greater fluency or responsiveness. Comparing their study with one by Paine and his associates, in which the schizophrenic group had a significantly higher degree of overinclusiveness, they comment that his group was not well defined and tended to fall into the schizoaffective good prognosis category. The authors conclude that overinclusive thinking is probably not specific to schizophrenia. Since it has been noted in patients with mania and acute schizophrenia, or perhaps schizoaffective disorder, it may be more closely related to affective disorder than to schizophrenia.