Inhibitory attentional control in patients with frontal lobe damage

The performance of a group of frontal lobe lesion and a group of frontal lobe dementia patients was compared with the performance of their respective matched normal control groups on two tests of inhibitory attentional control-the stop-signal reaction time task and a negative priming task. Both patient groups responded significantly slower than their respective normal control groups, but they showed only marginally significant selective impairments on the measures of inhibition. The data suggest that the specific inhibitory processes evaluated by these two tests are, in general, spared in patients with focal frontal lobe lesions or frontal lobe degeneration.     

Associative learning impairments in patients with frontal lobe damage

The performance of 18 frontal lobe lesion (FL) and 10 frontal lobe dementia (FLD) patients on an associative memory test was compared with the performance of their matched normal controls. The FL group was severely impaired on cued and free recall and was moderately impaired on a recognition condition. Left FL patients performed the poorest on the cued and free recall conditions. The FLD patients were moderately impaired on the free recall condition only but there was a subgroup of FLD patients with additional left temporal atrophy who appeared severely impaired on both cued and free recall. These findings indicate that both left frontal and temporal lobe damage can impair associative learning and that this impairment is more strikingly seen with free rather than cued recall.     

Psychopathology, childhood trauma, and personality traits in patients with borderline personality disorder and their sisters

The aim of this study was to document and compare adverse childhood experiences, and personality profiles in women with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and their sisters, and to determine how these factors impact current psychopathology. Fifty-six patients with BPD and their sisters were compared on measures assessing psychopathology, personality traits, and childhood adversities. Most sisters showed little evidence of psychopathology. Both groups reported dysfunctional parent-child relationships and a high prevalence of childhood trauma. Subjects with BPD reported experiencing more emotional abuse and intrafamilial sexual abuse, but more similarities than differences between probands and sisters were found. In multilevel analyses, personality traits of affective instability and impulsivity predicted DIB-R scores and SCL-90-R scores, above and beyond trauma. There were few relationships between childhood adversities and other measures of psychopathology. Sensitivity to adverse experiences, as reflected in the development of psychopathology, appears to be influenced by personality trait profiles.     

Automatic and controlled verbal-information processing in patients with frontal lobe lesions

The selectivity of frontal lobe lesion effects in the domains of verbal-information processing has not been well established. The authors hypothesized that capacity-limited controlled processing would be more impaired than automatic processing in frontal lobe patients (FLPs). Fifteen FLPs were compared with 2 matched control groups: 14 posterior-lesion patients and 15 normal controls. Both behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures were collected. Results suggest that both automatic and controlled processing were affected by frontal lobe lesions. ERP results indicated that the main dificulty for the FLPs was in the perceptual stage of information processing. This rather unexpected result may be explained by a basic difficulty of FLPs in attending to a new stimulus in order to process it.     

Disorders in planning and strategy application in frontal lobe lesion patients

The aim of this study was to investigate deficits in planning ability using an adapted version of the Modified Six Elements Test, from the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome—BADS [Wilson, B. A., Alderman, N., Burgess, P. W., Emslie, H., & Evans, J. J. (1996). Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS). Bury St Edmunds, U.K.: Thames Valley Test Company. Trans. Ricardo O Souza, Sergio L Schmidt. Rio de Janeiro: Cognição]. Subjects were left- and right-frontal lobe lesion patients. Other measures of executive dysfunctions used were verbal fluency, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and the Trail Making Test. These other instruments were sensitive to detect executive deficits in the left frontal lobe lesion group, except the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, which showed impairment only for the frontal lobe lesion group as a whole. The Modified Six Elements Test detected planning disorders in left frontal lobe lesion patients. The deficit of these patients was due to a greater likelihood to break the rules of the task, that is, in plan-following processes, rather than in planning the strategic approach to solve it.     

The criminal and personality profile of patients with schizophrenia and comorbid psychopathic traits

Sixty-one male forensic patients who met the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia were categorised into high and low psychopathic trait groups using the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version. The groups were compared on their criminal history, symptom profile, personality style, risk scores and subsequent institutional violence. Patients with high scores on the PCL:SV had a greater number of previous convictions and were more likely to have a family history of criminality. The high psychopathy-scoring group had higher levels of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale grandiose and hostile symptomatology, and higher scores on trait impulsivity and aggression. They also had a more coercive, less compliant interpersonal style than the low-psychopathy scoring group. The high-psychopathy scoring group were more likely to be involved in institutional aggression and had higher levels of risk for violence. Patients with schizophrenia and high levels of comorbid psychopathy have a distinctive interpersonal style that may contribute to their greater risk of disruptive institutional behaviour.     

The frontal lobe and aggression

Frontal lesions often lead to psychosocial problems. It is not surprising that frontal lobe dysfunctions have been proposed to underlie antisocial behaviour in individuals without apparent lesions. However, physical aggression and violence have never been systematically related to acquired lesions. Whereas, traditional neuropsychological testing identifies problems in cognitive and emotional information processing, recent brain-imaging studies have revealed both the frontal structural and functional underpinnings of antisocial behaviour. Careful characterization of antisocial behaviour subtypes seems to indicate that cognitive-neuropsychological function is systematically poor in physical aggression and hyperactivity. Recent refinements point to biological and genetic moderators of that association.     

Time ordering in frontal lobe patients: a stochastic model approach

Frontal lobe patients reproduced a sequence of capital letters or abstract shapes. Immediate and delayed reproduction trials allowed the analysis of short- and long-term memory for time order by means of suitable Markov chain stochastic models. Patients were as proficient as healthy subjects on the immediate reproduction trial, thus showing spared encoding and short-term memory. They failed, instead, on the delayed trials with capital letters, but not with random shapes, suggesting that their long-term memory impairment did not depend on primary deficits for ordering, but on inability to benefit from the organisational strategies that improve the retention and retrieval in normal subjects.     

Prospective memory and frontal lobe function

The study sought to examine the role of frontal lobe functioning in focal prospective memory (PM) performance and its relation to PM deficit in older adults. PM and working memory (WM) differences were studied in younger aged (n = 21), older aged (n = 20), and frontal injury (n = 14) groups. An event-based focal PM task was employed and three measures of WM were administered. The younger aged group differed from the other two groups in showing significantly higher scores on PM and on one of the WM measures, but there were no differences at a statistically significant level between the older aged group and the frontal injury groups on any of the memory measures. There were, however, some differences in correlations with a WM measure between groups. It is concluded that there are similarities and differences in the deficits in PM between older adults and patients with frontal lobe injury on focal as well as nonfocal PM tasks.     

Mood, personality, and self-monitoring: negative affect and emotionality in relation to frontal lobe mechanisms of error monitoring

A fundamental question in frontal lobe function is how motivational and emotional parameters of behavior apply to executive processes. Recent advances in mood and personality research and the technology and methodology of brain research provide opportunities to address this question empirically. Using event-related-potentials to track error monitoring in real time, the authors demonstrated that variability in the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN) is dependent on mood and personality variables. College students who are high on negative affect (NA) and negative emotionality (NEM) displayed larger ERN amplitudes early in the experiment than participants who are low on these dimensions. As the high-NA and -NEM participants disengaged from the task, the amplitude of the ERN decreased. These results reveal that affective distress and associated behavioral patterns are closely related with frontal lobe executive functions.     

Temporal lobe signs and personality characteristics

Mature university students (14 men and 16 women) were asked to complete the 16 PF and a scale that samples temporal lobe signs in the normal population. People who reported frequent temporal lobe experiences were more emotionally unstable, impulsive, emotionally sensitive (imaginative inner self, actions based upon intuition and self-anxiety), and tense (free-floating anxiety). The results were compatible with personality characteristics of people who report "temporal lobe experiences" and have been assessed by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the California Personality Inventory.     

Retrograde amnesia in patients with hippocampal, medial temporal, temporal lobe, or frontal pathology

There is considerable controversy concerning the theoretical basis of retrograde amnesia (R.A.). In the present paper, we compare medial temporal, medial plus lateral temporal, and frontal lesion patients on a new autobiographical memory task and measures of the more semantic aspects of memory (famous faces and news events). Only those patients with damage extending beyond the medial temporal cortex into the lateral temporal regions showed severe impairment on free recall remote memory tasks, and this held for both the autobiographical and the more semantic memory tests. However, on t-test analysis, the medial temporal group was impaired in retrieving recent autobiographical memories. Within the medial temporal group, those patients who had combined hippocampal and parahippocampal atrophy (H+) on quantified MRI performed somewhat worse on the semantic tasks than those with atrophy confined to the hippocampi (H-), but scores were very similar on autobiographical episodic recall. Correlational analyses with regional MRI volumes showed that lateral temporal volume was correlated significantly with performance on all three retrograde amnesia tests. The findings are discussed in terms of consolidation, reconsolidation, and multiple trace theory: We suggest that a widely distributed network of regions underlies the retrieval of past memories, and that the extent of lateral temporal damage appears to be critical to the emergence of a severe remote memory impairment.     

Attribution of blame for criminal acts and its relationship with personality

This paper examines the relationship between some personality variables and attribution of blame by offenders for their criminal activity. A specially-designed ‘Blame Attribution Inventory’ was constructed and administered to 224 Ss who had committed ‘serious’ criminal acts. Factor analysis of the items revealed 3 independent factors: (1) ‘External’ Attribution (i.e. blaming the crime on social circumstances, victims, society); (2) ‘Mental-Element’ Attribution (i.e. blaming responsibility for the crime on mental illness, poor self-control, distorted perception); (3) ‘Guilt-Feeling’ Attribution (i.e. feelings of remorse, regrets, need for punishment). The inventory was administered to 40 offender patients who had completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ), the Gough Socialization Scale (GSS) and the Beck Depression Inventory. External Attribution had significant correlation with the EPQ P scale, Mental-Element Attribution correlated significantly with the EPQ L scale and the GSS. Guilt-Feeling Attribution was associated with depression and neuroticism.     

Cattell 16 personality profiles of patients following closed-head injuries

The personality scores from Cattell's 16 PF for 188 patients who had been referred for neuropsychological assessment following motor vehicle incidents were analyzed as a function of the severity of neuropsychological impairment (Halstead-Reitan Index) and time since the injury. Patients who were impaired (Index > 0.4) exhibited lower scores on Factor B (moe concrete thinking), Factor E (more submissive), and Factor F (more cautious) than patients who were not impaired. The presence of impairment accommodated only 10% of the variance in Factor E scores, associated with the largest group difference. There were no significant differences between scores on any of the personality factors, verbal intelligence, or standardized reading ability as a function of time since the injury.     

Behavioral assessment of methylphenidate in a child with frontal lobe damage

The assessment and management of inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behavior in a 6-year-old girl who experienced frontal lobe damage are described. A multimodel approach combining medical, educational, and behavioral techniques to assess hyperactive behavior, optimal medication level, and medication and psychotherapeutic effectiveness is described. The results of the study suggest that in similar cases, children and adolescents manifesting these behaviors should be given a trial of stimulant medication in a controlled environment to assess if such therapy is indicated. Additional support is given for the increasing need for detanté and cooperation with health-care professionals.