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Cross-national study of diagnosis of the mental disorders: a comparative psychometric assessment of elderly patients admitted to mental hospitals serving Queens County, New York, and the former borough of Camberwell, London.

In a cross-national comparison of the frequency of occurrence of various diagnoses among elderly psychiatric patients admitted to public mental hospitals in London and New York, a short battery of psychological tests was administered to all patients independently of psychiatric examination. The psychological assessment was focused on the differentiation between dementing and affective disorders. The test performance showed a highly significant difference between the two groups as diagnosed, and when patients were allocated to groups on the basis of tests alone these allocations showed a high rate of agreement with initial psychiatric diagnosis. There was a similar high rate of agreement between test allocation and hospital diagnosis in the U.K., but this was not so in the U.S. No significant differences were found between the test performance of U.K. and U.S. patients, except on the WAIS Vocabulary and the Angles Error measurement of the Bender-Gestalt test. When the effects of age and Vocabulary score were eliminated these differences disappeared. The hypothesis that the diagnosis of affective disorder would be confirmed by a relatively greater improvement in test performance over time in this group of patients was not upheld by the non-parametric analysis of change scores. However, an analysis of covariance utilizing age and initial score did indicate the expected differential improvement.

Affective Symptoms

Semantic desensitization: language conditioning or demand characteristics manipulation?

Previous studies in language conditioning, especially those called semantic desensitization, have shown changes in self-report, behavioral measures, and the semantic meaning of the target concept following treatment. This last has been proposed as a causal variable but experimental and control groups differed greatly in terms of their demand characteristics. The present study included a placebo group with demand characteristics similar to those of the control group. The target area was self-concept (18 male Ss, 9 female Ss). Significant changes in self-report and actual performance with a hand dynamometer were obtained but these were as great for the placebo group as for the experimental groups. It was suggested that factors other than conditioning are of importance in semantic desensitization.

Awareness

Picture mediation in abstract-concrete paired associates.

The present study investigated the hypothesis that pictures of abstract-concrete paired associates would serve to make the abstract stimulus member more concrete thereby enhancing the learning process. 60 subjects were equally divided into 6 groups, varying conditions of concreteness and abstractness of the stimulus items and pictures or no picture. The results supported the basic proposition that the picture mediation presented during the learning-testing condition facilitated the learning of the abstract paired associates.

Humans

Perceptual reactance and task performance.

57 female subjects participated in a study in which perceptual reactance was assessed by the kinesthetic figural aftereffects test. Subjects identified as augmenters were quicker than reducers on a disjunctive reaction time task and a significant interactive effect was found on a paired-associate task. Augmenters performed better on a similar list while reducers were more effective on a dissimilar list.

Female

Visuoperceptual processes in brain damaged patients on the digit symbol substitution test.

Alcoholic Korsakoff patients, patients with right hemisphere damage, and chronic alcoholics are impaired on the digit symbol substitution task (DSST) of the WAIS. To determine whether these deficits were related to psychomotor or visuoperceptive factors, several tasks and modifications of the DSST were administered to these three patient populations. While it was evident that psychomotor retardation contributed to the patients' poor performance, impairments in visuoperceptive processing were also found to be involved in the DSST performance of the three patient groups. It was concluded that while a psychomotor factor is the crucial variable in the performance of intact normal subjects, any of a number of visual processing variables (e.g., visual scanning, contour formation and organization) must be considered in assessing the deficits of brain damaged patients.

Aged

Pictorial superiority effect.

Pictures generally show superior recognition relative to their verbal labels. This experiment was designed to link this pictorial superiority effect to sensory or meaning codes associated with the two types of symbols. Paired-associate stimuli consisted of simple pictures or of their labels, with list items selected either from the same conceptual category or from different conceptual categories. In addition, schematic or visual similarity among the pictures was either high or low. At two rates of presentation equal amounts of conceptual interference were produced for pictures and their labels. High schematic similarity eliminated the pictorial superiority effects at the slow rate and completely reversed it at the fast rate. These results suggest that the meaning representations for simple pictures and their labels may be identical, and that the pictorial superiority effect is related to the qualitative superiority of the sensory codes for pictures.

Concept Formation

Associative symmetry in the PA learning of retarded and nonrerarded children.

Mentally retarded and nonretarded children learned pairs of pictures in a single-function order (A and B terms of each pair were in the same position throughout) or in a double-function order (all items were re-paired and served as A and B terms). Associative symmetry was demonstrated by all groups when the lists were presented single-function; forward asymmetry was demonstrated when the list was presented double-function. When categorized pairs were presented double-function, items that were correctly associated by category produced symmetry; items that were correctly associated but not by category produced forward asymmetry. The possible influence of single vs. multiple associations on associative symmetry was discussed.

Child

Sentence mediation and stimulus blocking in free recall.

In a two-phasing training study, EMR adolescents were initially provided with sentences linking each pair of 2 words in a 20-word list to be free recalled. In a second phase, subjects were required to create and verbalize their own sentences. This sentence-mediation condition was compared with (a) one in which items were presented in the same fixed pairs from trial-to-trial, but without sentences and (b) a group that received items in changing pairs. Results indicated superiority of both sentence-mediation and fixed-pairs treatments in comparison to the changing-pairs condition on both correct recall and subjective organization. Sentences did not facilitate recall more than did consistent ordering. The results were discussed in the context of the growing evidence that providing input structure can remediate organization deficits in retarded persons.

Adolescent

Cognitive processes and academic achievement in EMR adolescents.

Twelve cognitive process variables were investigated as predictors of reading and arithmetic achievement and studied for internal structure, with 115 EMR adolescent subjects. Stepwise regression and factor analyses were employed to study prediction and structure, respectively. Memory variables were the most important predictors of reading. They were also involved in arithmetic but to a lesser extent. The data suggested that the ability to generate and utilize strategies facilitating the recall of unstructured material as well as the capacity to be sensitive to strategy-relevant structure embedded in stimuli were important prerequisites for the acquisition of reading skills. An oddity task, measuring the ability to maintain the same relational focus for successive applications to new stimulus material, was found to be most pertinent for predicting arithmetic computational skills.

Achievement

Age, rate and instructional conditions: empirical support against the pacing variable.

The present study was an attempt to determine if the pacing effect was an artifact of the confounding of presentation rate and total learning time. Two presentation rates were factorially varied with three instructional conditions for two different age groups in a paired-associate and free-recall task. The results of the study replicated the pacing effect when learning time was deliberately confounded. When total learning time was equated for the presentation rates the pacing effect was not replicated, demonstrating that pacing is an artifact. It was suggested that the total time principle, not pacing, was the viable explanatory concept. The results of the manipulation of instructional conditions suggest that it is inappropriate to assume that a set of instructions will result in equivalent performance for both young and old samples.

Adolescent