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Some Psychological Correlates of Age and Dementia
Author(s) -
WHITE J. GRAHAM,
KNOX S. J.
Publication year - 1965
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1965.tb00473.x
Subject(s) - dementia , psychology , depression (economics) , cognition , electroencephalography , clinical psychology , psychiatry , developmental psychology , disease , medicine , pathology , economics , macroeconomics
Clinical psychologists are often asked to help in the diagnosis of dementia, especially in the setting of depression in the older age groups. The general problem here is that of differentiating the effects of senescence from the effects of dementia on various measures of cognitive functioning. The measures used for this purpose may be regarded as measures of intelligence and as measures of learning. To elucidate this problem two sets of data have been examined, one from a sample of seventy‐six normally healthy old men and women living in the community, the other from a sample of ninety psychiatric patients, suspected to be suffering from a dementing illness. The results suggest that the effects of age on various intelligence measures may generally be negative, as hypothesized, while the effects of dementia, as defined by abnormal EEG readings, cannot be inferred from any of the intelligence measures examined. In the case of auditory verbal learning, again as predicted, the effects of age are insignificant; while the results of the learning task coincide with those of the EEG in predicting dementia.