Psychometry – 1

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47 Psychometry – 1

Deborah McCartney

	T	F
1. Adaptive Behaviour Scales are used to assess people with learning disabilities.
2. The Beck Depression Inventory was designed to be administered by a trained psychologist.
3. The BPRS is used to screen for psychiatric disorders in the general population.
4. The Clifton Assessment Procedures for the Elderly (CAPE) can identify intellectual deterioration.
5. In a selective attention task the target stimulus is presented amongst a series of random stimuli on a computer screen.
6. The GHQ is used to rule out physical health problems.
7. Goldstein’s Object Sorting Test distinguishes between depression and depressive pseudodementia.
8. The Hawthorne effect includes a visual percept.
9. The Hayling Sentence Completion test assesses dorsolateral prefrontal cortical function.
10. Standardized intelligence tests can be modified to suit the individual.
11. The Manchester scale is a self-rated questionnaire.
12. MMPI is used to assess new antidepressants.
13. The Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (MHVS) can identify intellectual deterioration.
14. ‘Pathways to Independence’ is used to assess people with mental handicap.
15. Formal psychological testing is essential for the assessment of premorbid personality.
16. The proverb interpretation test distinguishes between dementia and depressive pseudodementia.
17. In subcortical dementia, recall is more disturbed than recognition.
18. The Rey-Osterrieth test is used to assess personality.
19. Spearman’s work on intelligence used factor analysis.
20. Reasoning is a component of intelligence as defined by Sternberg.
21. Patients with Parkinson’s disease perform poorly on set-shifting tasks.
22. The Stroop test is used to assess selective attention.
23. The Trail Making Test is a test for memory.
24. In WAIS, digit span is relatively preserved in old age as compared to vocabulary.
25. The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test is sensitive to frontal damage.

ANSWERS

1. Adaptive Behaviour Scales are used to assess people with learning disabilities.

True: The Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales and the Adaptive Behaviour Scales of the American Association for Mental Retardation are standardized instruments used to evaluate daily living, socialization and motor skills in people with learning disabilities (Gelder et al 2000, p. 1936; Lezak 1995, p. 587).

2. The Beck Depression Inventory was designed to be administered by a trained psychologist.

True: The Beck Depression Inventory was designed to be administered by a trained psychologist who read each statement in the inventory and asked the respondent to select the statement that best fits. In practice, it is usually completed by the patient as a self-report measure.

3. The BPRS is used to screen for psychiatric disorders in the general population.

False: The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale is used for assessing severity and changes in severity of symptoms in severe mental illness. It is not a screening instrument (Gelder et al 2006, p. 66).

4. The Clifton Assessment Procedures for the Elderly (CAPE) can identify intellectual deterioration.

True: The CAPE was devised as a brief measure of psychological functioning including the level of disability and the need for care in psychogeriatric patients. CAPE has two scales, the cognitive scale with 12 questions on information/orientation and the behaviour rating scale with four subscales. It was designed to be used by nurses. It has been validated against outcome in day hospital and day centre care. It helps distinguish between organic and non-organic conditions in the elderly (Butler & Pitt 1998, p. 10; Lishman 1997, p. 125).

5. In a selective attention task the target stimulus is presented amongst a series of random stimuli on a computer screen.

False: In a selective attention task the target appears on the screen along with randomly distributed non-target stimuli.

In a continuous performance test of sustained attention, a series of stimuli appear one after another with occasional target stimuli and many distractors preceding and following it (Fear 2004, p. 12; Halligan et al 2003, p. 83).

6. The GHQ is used to rule out physical health problems.

False: The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is a self-rated questionnaire for identifying psychiatric ‘caseness’ in community, general medical and primary care settings. The GHQ was originally designed to assess the psychiatric distress associated with general medical illness. It is not used to rule out physical health problems (Gelder et al 2006, p. 66; Wright et al 2005, p. 127).

7. Goldstein’s Object Sorting Test distinguishes between depression and depressive pseudodementia.

False: Goldstein’s Object Sorting Test was designed to assess abstract thinking and categorization. It explores the ability to abstract common properties of objects and to shift from one frame of reference to another. These executive functions are particularly vulnerable to frontal lobe lesions. Goldstein’s Object Sorting Test would not distinguish between depression and pseudodementia (Lishman 1997, p. 120).

8. The Hawthorne effect includes a visual percept.

False: The ‘Hawthorne effect’ is a non-specific effect caused by a subject’s awareness that they are participating in research. The term originates from the Hawthorne plant in Chicago where in a study the mere presence of observers affected in the way in which the subjects behaved. It does not necessarily include a visual percept (Lawrie et al 2000, p. 254).

9. The Hayling Sentence Completion test assesses dorsolateral prefrontal cortical function.

True: The Hayling Sentence Completion test is designed to assess executive functions such as response initiation and response inhibition. The subject is given 30 sentences from which the last word is omitted. In part 1, the initiation condition, they complete the sentences with a word that makes sense. In part 2, the inhibition condition, they have to supply a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence, e.g. ‘Banana is a yellow delusion.’ Scoring is based on response latencies and error scores (Halligan et al 2003, p. 315).

10. Standardized intelligence tests can be modified to suit the individual.

False: Standardized intelligence tests cannot be modified, because they are objective, structured, standardized measures. They must be administered in a prescribed manner as laid down in the manuals. They have a normal distribution of scores. They are not culture free, however, and the scores will vary from the expected norms depending on whether the test is standardized and used in the subject’s first language, and the language abilities and educational background of the subject.

11. The Manchester scale is a self-rated questionnaire.

False: The Manchester scale or Krawiecka-Manchester scale (K-MS) is a standardized scale for rating positive and negative symptoms in chronic psychosis. It rates four symptoms and four signs on a scale of 0–4. There is no interview schedule. The rating is completed by the clinician.

There are many different Manchester scales including those to assess GP trainees; a self-rated questionnaire assessing quality of clinical supervision; and a scale for grading of hallux valgus (Johnstone et al 2004, p. 182).

12. MMPI is used to assess new antidepressants.

False: The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is an objective measure of personality. It was developed as a pencil and paper version of a psychiatric interview. It has 10 clinical scales and 4 correction scales including a lie scale. The original 1943 version has 550 statements concerning attitudes, emotional reactions, physical and psychological symptoms and experiences. The subject has to answer ‘true’, ‘false’ or ‘cannot say’ to each statement. The 1980 revised version, MMPI-2, has 567 questions. There is also an adolescent version, the MMPI-A (Aiken 2000, p. 314; Fear 2004, p. 18; Wright et al 2005, p. 183).

13. The Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (MHVS) can identify intellectual deterioration.

True: The MHVS is an 80-word multiple-choice vocabulary test. The raw scores are converted to percentiles. It is standardized for ages 20 to 65 years. Vocabulary level is an excellent guide to intellectual performance. MHVS is sensitive to verbal intellectual decline, particularly where there is a lesion in the dominant hemisphere (Lezak 1995, p. 306).

14. ‘Pathways to Independence’ is used to assess people with mental handicap.

True: These are checklists of daily living skills completed by the rater to assess basic independence skills, strengths and weaknesses, and to highlight areas where training or support may be required.

15. Formal psychological testing is essential for the assessment of premorbid personality.

False: Aspects of personality can be assessed from a patient’s and collateral descriptions of their history, relationships, leisure, predominant mood and emotions, attitudes, standards and other character traits, e.g. perfectionist, impulsive, sensitive, controlling, etc. It is important to ask others who know the individual well and to observe the individual’s manner and behaviour at the interview (Gelder et al 2006, p. 42).

16. The proverb interpretation test distinguishes between dementia and depressive pseudodementia.

False: Some degree of abstract thinking is necessary to interpret proverbs. For example, ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ is not literally a piece of advice for running a kitchen with specific regard to soup preparation but might be taken to be so by patients with concrete thinking. Frontal lobe damage, low educational background and schizophrenia are all potential causes. The proverb interpretation test would not differentiate dementia and depressive pseudodementia (Hodges 1994, p. 119).

17. In subcortical dementia, recall is more disturbed than recognition.

True: Patients with subcortical dementia have difficulty with free recall of information from memory. However, if given cues, as in a recognition test, they perform better. This suggests that the retrieval rather than the encoding process may be impaired in subcortical dementia. Recall and recognition are both severely affected in Alzheimer’s disease (Hodges 1994, p. 36).

18. The Rey-Osterrieth test is used to assess personality.

False: The Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure test requires the subject to copy a complex two-dimensional drawing and then reproduce it later without being warned that they will be asked to do so. It is used to evaluate constructional ability and visual memory, not personality (Hodges 1994, p. 211).

19. Spearman’s work on intelligence used factor analysis.

True: Charles Spearman was the originator of factor analysis. He proposed a 2-factor theory of intelligence, i.e. a general factor (g) and a group of specific (s) factors. He believed that ‘g’ played a part in all intellectual activities, but any given activity was also affected by one of the ‘s’ factors specific to particular abilities. According to him, ‘g’ factor is the major determinant of performance on intelligence tests.

21. Patients with Parkinson’s disease perform poorly on set-shifting tasks.

True: Executive function difficulties in Parkinson’s disease include impaired sequencing of voluntary motor activities, difficulty maintaining and switching set, and abnormalities in selective attention (Mitchell 2004, p. 153; Yudofsky & Hales 2002, p. 933).

22. The Stroop test is used to assess selective attention.

True: The Stroop Colour Word Tests are a group of tests based on Stroop’s (1935) observation that it takes longer to read printed colour names when they are printed in coloured ink different from the name of the colour word. They are used to assess selective attention maintained in the face of interference. In the Stroop tests, the same task is presented twice, first without and then with distraction or interference by irrelevant stimuli. The subject is asked to read words presented in different colours. In the first presentation, the words are printed in the colour they describe, e.g. the word ‘red’ is printed in red colour. In the second presentation, the word ‘red’ is printed in green colour. The subject is asked to read the words as quickly as possible. In the second presentation, the colour of the written word acts as a distracter or interference. This leads to slowing down of performance and mistakes. Thus, it is a test of attention maintained in the face of interference. It detects prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as response conflict, impaired selective attention and impaired response inhibition (Halligan et al 2003, p. 74; Lishman 1997, p. 118).

23. The Trail Making Test is a test for memory.

False: The Trail Making Test is a quick and simple test of visuomotor skill, tracking, conceptualization, set-shifting and response inhibition. Motor slowing, incoordination, visual scanning difficulties, poor motivation and frontal executive problems result in impaired performance. The Trail Making Test has two parts, A and B. Patients with frontal lobe dysfunction perform disproportionately poorly on part B. It is not a memory test (Hodges 1994, p. 219; Lishman 1997, p. 120).

24. In WAIS, digit span is relatively preserved in old age as compared to vocabulary.

False: ‘Hold’ tests, e.g. vocabulary, information, object assembly and picture completion are thought to reflect the use of old knowledge and are relatively resistant to the effects of brain damage.

‘Don’t hold’ tests, e.g. digit symbol, digit span, similarities and block design which require speed of response, working memory or the creation of new relations between unrelated items are more likely to show early decline (Lishman 1997, p. 111).

25. The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test is sensitive to frontal damage.

True: It is particularly sensitive to frontal lobe damage, especially lesions of the dorso-lateral convexities of the frontal lobe, and particularly of the left side, rather than inferior and orbital lesions. However, performance can be impaired in subjects with lesions elsewhere (Fear 2004, p. 69; Hodges 1994, p. 226; Lishman 1997, p. 118).

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