Rate of forgetting in dementia and depression.

Patients with mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), patients with major depression, and normal control subjects were examined for rate of forgetting line drawings of common objects after the groups had been equated for acquisition by the variation of stimulus exposure time. Depressed and DAT patients demonstrated learning impairments, but only the DAT group showed rapid forgetting in the first 10 min after learning to criterion. This finding suggests that some form of deficient consolidation contributes to memory loss in DAT but not in depression and implicates the disruption of different psychobiological mechanisms in these disorders. The rate of forgetting paradigm may be clinically useful for distinguishing patients with early DAT from elderly depressed patients with memory deficits. (53 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Digit symbol performance in mild dementia and depression.

Patients with mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), patients with major depression, and normal control subjects completed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Digit Symbol test and a measure of incidental memory for the digit-symbol pairs. Mild DAT and depressed patients had equivalent deficits in psychomotor speed, but DAT patients recalled fewer digit-symbol items. Although the standard administration of the Digit Symbol test has limited utility in differential diagnosis, the addition of a brief measure of incidental memory may be clinically useful as part of the battery of neuropsychological tests used to distinguish early dementia from depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Clinical tests of memory in dementia, depression, and healthy aging.

In Study 1, 20 elderly adults (mean age 72.7 yrs) with primary degenerative dementia or major depression were compared to 10 healthy aged controls on 3 tests of learning and memory: the Benton Visual Retention Test; a paired-associate learning test; and the object–memory evaluation (OME) developed by P. A. Fuld (1981). The sharpest distinction in performance among the groups was observed on the OME, and discriminant equations based on this test correctly classified at least 90% of the Ss. Study 2 applied the classification rules derived in the 1st investigation to an unselected series of 25 63–86 yr old geropsychiatry inpatients referred for neuropsychological evaluation. There was agreement between memory test classification and general categories of clinical discharge diagnosis (organic vs functional) for 21 of the Ss and with status at follow-up approximately 18 mo later. Predictive value computations suggested that the OME is more accurate in confirming true dementia than in detecting dementia syndromes associated with functional disorders. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention to emotional faces following recovery from depression.

This study was designed to examine attentional biases in the processing of emotional faces in currently and formerly depressed participants and healthy controls. Using a dot-probe task, the authors presented faces expressing happy or sad emotions paired with emotionally neutral faces. Whereas both currently and formerly depressed participants selectively attended to the sad faces, the control participants selectively avoided the sad faces and oriented toward the happy faces, a positive bias that was not observed for either of the depressed groups. These results indicate that attentional biases in the processing of emotional faces are evident even after individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. Implications of these findings for understanding the roles of cognitive and interpersonal functioning in depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Occurrence of dementia and depression in an elderly Danish population

A community survey of all Danish speaking residents above the age of 64 in a geographically delimited area was performed. The aim of the survey was to establish the prevalence of dementia disorders and depression by the use of international screening tools: the Mini Mental State Examination for dementia and the Beck's Depression Inventory for depression. The screening was performed during the period of one year in the municipality of Karlebo and the interviews took place in the homes of the participants. Six hundred and sixty-four (66%) of the 1,008 eligible persons entered the study. Six percent were residents in nursing homes. Thirteen point seven percent were found to be suffering from dementia. Nine point six percent had symptoms of depression. These prevalences would indicate that more than 6,000 persons in Frederiksborg county suffer from dementia while more than 4,000 might be suffering from depression. The study confirms knowledge obtained in other studies, indicating that one out of seven of the elderly suffers from dementia. We do not conclude, however, that nine point six percent suffer from depression, but rather that they need further examination to make it possible to decide whether they are indeed depressed.     

Impact of Alzheimer's-type dementia and information source on the assessment of depression.

Assessment of depression in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is complicated by uncertainty regarding the accuracy of information supplied by the patient and collateral informants. Agreement between these two sources in completing the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD; M. Hamilton, 1960) was compared in patients with AD (n?=?185) and two groups of nondemented outpatients: patients with Parkinson's disease (n?=?57) and geriatric referrals (n?=?54). The correlation between HRSD scores generated from structured interviews with patients and collateral sources was attenuated in AD (r?=?.29) in comparison with Parkinson's disease (r?=?.92) and geriatric outpatients (r?=?.85). Differences in scores between interview methods in AD reflected a generally low rate of symptom endorsement by patients. These findings highlight the potential insensitivity of patient report in AD and support the use of collateral informants as an alternative source of clinical information in persons with significant cognitive impairment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention and clinical depression: Performance on a deployment-of-attention task.

Clinically depressed and nondepressed individuals completed a deployment-of-attention task developed by I. H. Gotlib, A. L. McLachlan, and A. N. Katz (1988). Results indicated that the clinically depressed individuals perform the task in an unbiased fashion, attending equally to positive-, negative-, and neutral-content stimuli. In contrast, the nondepressed individuals demonstrated a "protective" bias against the perception of negative stimuli by avoiding such material in favor of positive or neutral stimuli. Overall, the results of this study suggest that clinically depressed individuals do not show an attentional bias toward negative information, but rather, fail to demonstrate the positive or protective bias that is evident in nondepressed individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective recall of positive and negative feedback, self-control behaviors, and depression.

Tested 2 sets of hypotheses, derived from cognitive–behavioral theories of depression, that (a) compared to a sample of nondepressed controls, depressed Ss would underestimate the frequency of reinforcement and overestimate the frequency of punishment received during an ambiguous laboratory task; and (b) when given the opportunity to self-reinforce or self-punish, depressed Ss would self-reinforce less often and self-punish more often than controls. Three of these predictions were supported. In an experiment with 24 depressed and 21 nondepressed undergraduates (Beck Depression Inventory), depressed Ss recalled less positive and more negative feedback than controls. As expected, these differences were significant only at a high rate of reinforcement and at a low rate of punishment. In the latter condition, however, depressed Ss were accurate in their recall, while nondepressed Ss underestimated the frequency of negative feedback. Depressed Ss self-reinforced less often than controls, but there were no differences in rates of self-punishment. Implications for cognitive and behavioral theories of depression are discussed. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Roles of function, reminding, and variability in categorization by 3-month-old infants.

The roles of function, reminding, and exemplar variability in categorization of a physically dissimilar object were studied with 3-month-old infants trained to move a crib mobile by kicking. Performance on a transfer test with a motionless novel object provided evidence of categorization. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants, like adults, initially categorized novel objects on the basis of physical appearance, but only if trained with multiple exemplars, after delays of 1 and 7 days. In Experiment 3, prior knowledge of an object's functional properties overrode physical dissimilarity as the basis for categorization and enabled reminding of the classification response 2 weeks later. In Experiment 4, postevent contingency information overrode physical and functional properties as the basis for categorization. These findings indicate that expectations and goals influence infants' category decisions and raise the possibility that infants of 3 months respond by analogy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Clinical and methodological issues in measuring rate of forgetting with the verbal selective reminding test.

Used a verbal selective reminding paradigm to examine rate of forgetting in a sample of 287 normal adults (aged 18–91 yrs). Results reveal that older Ss performed below levels obtained by younger ones on several measures of acquisition and delayed recall. Data also reveal very modest differences in rate of forgetting. However, the pattern of differences in forgetting varied, depending on the index used to measure what was stored during acquisition. Older adults obtained marginally higher forgetting rates using 2 of 3 indexes but exhibited less forgetting when another index was used. Data suggest that using the Trial 12 score for long-term storage (H. Buschke and P. Fuld, 1974) to calculate forgetting may be more valid from a practical and theoretical standpoint than using other learning measures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Longitudinal patterns of risk for depression in dementia caregivers: Objective and subjective primary stress as predictors.

The present study examined how patterns of risk for depression over 1 year in 188 dementia caregivers (consistently asymptomatic, n ?=?88; consistently symptomatic, n ?=?40; changing risk, n ?=?60) could be predicted by objective (behavior problems of the relative) and subjective (role captivity and overload) primary stress. Results reveal that all primary stressors differentiated caregivers who remained at low levels of symptomatology over the course of 1 year from those who were at risk for experiencing a depressive disorder. In addition, caregivers' subjective experience of role captivity predicted the chronicity of risk. Findings extend prior caregiving research on patterns of depressive symptomatology by highlighting the relationship between subjective primary stressors and stability and change in caregivers' mental health. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Progressive disability in senile dementia is accelerated in the presence of depression

The fatigue that may accompany or follow radiotherapy is often overlooked by health-care staff, yet this side-effect of treatment can cause great distress. More research into the causes and methods of relieving such symptoms is needed.     

Recognition memory in elderly patients with depression and dementia: a signal detection analysis

Elderly depressives sometimes perform as badly as patients with dementia on tests of memory. It was hypothesized that this might be because depressives adopt a very conservative response strategy rather than because their memory is really impaired. A test of this hypothesis, using signal detection analysis of a simple recognition task applied to 20 depressives, 20 dements, and 20 normal controls (all over 65 yrs old), gave results consistent with the hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variations in the reported age of a patient: A source of bias in the diagnosis of depression and dementia.

The presence of bias in assessing organic vs depressive pathology in the elderly psychiatric population has been clinically observed in the apparent tendency to overattribute cognitive deficits to senile dementia. In the present study, 21 male and 15 female 26–49 yr old clinical psychologists were presented with a taped interview in which the age of a 64-yr-old male with depressive pseudodementia was varied (either 55 or 75 yrs). It was assumed that the ambiguity involved in determining the etiology of the patient's cognitive deficits would elicit a social or diagnostic bias related to his age. Results show the presence of a bias, with a greater attribution of organic symptoms reflective of senile dementia and fewer judgments of depression when the patient was described as elderly rather than middle-aged. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective processing of negative information: Effects of clinical anxiety, concurrent depression, and awareness.

Anxious patients (n?=?20) and normal controls (n?=?20) carried out a modified Stroop color-naming task with anxiety- and depression-related words in supraliminal and subliminal exposure conditions. Within the anxious group, patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) without concurrent depression (n?=?11) showed more color-naming interference for anxiety words than neutral words in comparison with patients with a combined diagnosis of GAD and depression (n?=?9). Compared with controls, the GAD subgroup without concurrent depression showed slower color naming for negative than neutral words, in both supraliminal and subliminal conditions, replicating K. Mogg, B. R. Bradley, R. Williams, and A. Mathews's (1993) results. These findings provide further evidence of an anxiety-related bias for negative information in preconscious processes and highlight the importance of assessing concurrent depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective memory for positive and negative story content in children with high self- and peer-ratings of symptoms of depression.

Evaluated 322 6th-grade students (aged 10–13 yrs) who completed the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and a peer nomination inventory for depression (PNID). 89 Ss had high or low self-reported depressive symptoms (DSYs) and 62 had high or low peer-reported DSYs. Ss were presented with a story consisting of 10 positive events (PEs) and 10 negative events (NEs) and a memory task. The bulk of the findings are contradictory to a mood-congruent learning effect, in that Ss with high depressive ratings underrecognized NEs and overreported PEs. The significant interaction between group status (high or low depressive rating) and valence of story events for recognition memory, found with both CDI and PNID (males only) suggests that S's status interacts with memory for PEs and NEs. However, the interaction suggests that DSYs impair recognition memory for NEs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparison of cognitive impairments in dementia of the Alzheimer type and depression in the elderly

General cognitive function and specific language and memory processing abilities were compared in dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), depressed and normal control subjects. Several tests clearly differentiated between DAT and depressed subjects including a verbal fluency task, several components of a word memory test, an IQ deterioration index, and the Mini-Mental State Examination. The inability of DAT subjects to take advantage of semantic cues in both the verbal fluency and in the memory test contrasted with the performance of depressed and normal subjects, who were able to benefit from semantic cues. Depressed patients displayed deficits compared with normal controls on the more effortful verbal fluency task but not on the memory test. Tasks that are least effortful, rely on semantic associations, and require declarative memory are most likely to discriminate between DAT and depression.