False positive diagnosis of malingering due to the use of multiple effort tests.

Objective: Effort indicators are used to determine if neuropsychological test results are valid measures of a patient's cognitive abilities. The use of multiple effort measures is often advocated, but the false positive rate for multiple indicators depends on the number of measures used and the correlation among indicators. This study presents a meta-analysis of correlations among effort measures.

Changes in intellectual functioning associated with normal aging.

Declines in IQ scores with advancing age have been observed in each successive revision of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales. This study examined age-related changes on the fourth edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and compared these to the effects seen on the 1955, 1981, and 1997 standardizations of the scales. The most pronounced declines were in measures of processing speed and nonverbal reasoning.

The WASI matrix reasoning subtest: performance in traumatic brain injury, stroke, and dementia.

Previous research reported that the WAIS-III Matrix Reasoning (MR) subtest was insensitive to the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI), learning disability, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This study was conducted to determine whether these findings generalize to the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) MR subtest and to explore the subtest's sensitivity to other brain disorders. When 81 brain-damaged patients completed the WASI, the MR subtest was the highest score in the profile.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition Picture Arrangement subtest: impact of vertical administration.

We compared the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition Picture Arrangement (PA) scores via standard administration (SA) or vertical administration (VA). Fifty-seven college students were assigned to one of two conditions. Thirty SAs had means for age, education, and American College Testing (ACT) of 19.

Brief screening indexes for malingering: A confirmation of Vocabulary minus Digit Span from the WAIS-III and the Rarely Missed Index from the WMS-III.

This study investigated the specificity of empirically derived screening measures for the detection of symptom exaggeration in persons with a diagnosis of alcohol abuse (n = 30), polysubstance abuse (n = 43), or head trauma (n = 27). The first measure evaluated was Vocabulary (V) minus Digit Span (DS) (Mittenberg, Theroux-Fichera, Zielinski, & Heilbronner, 1995); the second measure was the Rarely Missed Index (RMI) for the WMS-III Logical Memory subtest (Killgore & Della-Pietra, 2000). V-DS misclassified 0% of individuals in the alcohol abuse group, 2% of those in the polysubstance abuse group, and 0% of head injury cases.

Relationships among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, induced labor, and selected physiological and demographic variables.

We investigated whether events associated with physiological maternal and fetal stress during the birth process were associated with diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), alone or in combination with demographic variables. We gathered data through maternal responses to a 17-item questionnaire. Sex, mother's educational level, mother's age at delivery, interval between the beginning of labor and birth, and presence or absence of complications during the delivery process accounted for 42% of the variance in the diagnostic (ADHD) category.

Exploratory factor analysis of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) in adult standardization and clinical samples.

Exploratory factor analyses were conducted separately on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI; The Psychological Corporation, 1999) adult standardization sample (n = 1,145) and a diagnostically heterogeneous adult clinical sample (n = 201). In the latter group, means for age, education, and WASI Full Scale IQ were 59.25 years (SD = 17.