Social functioning and frontal alpha asymmetry in schizophrenia.

Background: Schizophrenia (SZ) is a psychiatric disorder that often involves reduced social functioning. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is a neurophysiological marker extracted from electroencephalogram (EEG) data that is likely related to motivational and emotional tendencies, such as reduced motivation across various psychiatric disorders, including SZ. Therefore, it may offer a neurophysiological marker for social functioning.

Functional cooking skills and neuropsychological functioning in patients with stroke: an ecological validity study.

Efforts to relate neuropsychological performance to real-world task functioning have predominantly yielded lackluster results, typically with neuropsychological performance accounting for modest amounts of variance in function. Nonetheless, the ecological validity of neuropsychological measures for predicting functional abilities remains a strong research interest and clinical necessity. This study relates neuropsychological performance to performance on a standardised cooking task (Rabideau Kitchen Evaluation - Revised; RKE-R) in persons with stroke.

Effects of parental presence and child characteristics on children's neuropsychological test performance: third party observer effect confirmed.

An observer's presence during neuropsychological testing can impair task performance in adults, but this phenomenon has yet to be examined as it pertains to neuropsychological testing of children. The current study focused on parental presence effects on nonverbal intelligence and verbal learning performance of children aged 6 to 8 years. Each of 53 children completed one form of the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-3rd Edition (TONI-3) and the Selective Reminding Test (SRT) with his/her parent in the room and an alternate form of each with only the experimenter with the child in the testing room.

Potential for interpretation disparities of Halstead-Reitan neuropsychological battery performances in a litigating sample.

The performances of 110 litigants on seven variables from the Halstead-Reitan neuropsychological battery (HRNB) were used to compare Heaton, Miller, Taylor, and Grant's (2004) Deficit Scale (DS) and Reitan and Wolfson's (1993) Neuropsychological Deficit Scale (NDS). Additional comparisons were made for people who passed or failed the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) to determine effects of effort on scores generated by either scoring system. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that all seven comparisons were significantly different for the full sample (p< or =0.

Regulations governing the out-of-state practice of psychology: implications for forensic neuropsychologists.

Many states allow psychologists licensed in other jurisdictions to practice temporarily without obtaining a full license. However, both the restrictions of practice and the procedures required before practice is allowed vary extensively among states. This article examines the regulations of U.

An examination of the California Verbal Learning Test II to detect incomplete effort in a traumatic brain-injury sample.

Clinical neuropsychologists are frequently called on to distinguish people who appear impaired on neuropsychological testing due to putting forth incomplete effort from those who have genuine cognitive deficits. Because traditional measures of effort are becoming accessible over the Internet and within the legal community and their purpose may be obvious to potential malingerers, nontraditional effort measures have been newly investigated. Using discriminant function analysis, this study explores whether five California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition (CVLT-II) variables could differentiate between head-injured patients who were putting forth full effort and those who were putting forth incomplete effort.

"Cognitive impairment associated with toxigenic fungal exposure": a critique and critical analysis.

Recently Gordon et al. (2004) reported the results of a study relating exposure to toxigenic fungi to cognitive impairment. A number of methodological problems limit the utility of this study, including the authors' not examining a number of potential confounding variables, use of a mild traumatic brain injury group as a comparison, and problematic statistical analyses increasing the Type 1 error rate.