Spiritual health,illness, and death

This essay outlines a view of spiritual health in middle life, particularly as it relates to an individual's confrontation with mortality. It was originally offered as part of a symposium on “Living and Dying” at the twenty-fifth reunion of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1968 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June, 1993.     

Book reviews

Private Practice Youngstown, Ohio 44512     

SCL-90-R symptom patterns for adolescent psychiatric inpatients

We collected Symptom Check List-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) symptom pattern and severity data from a sample of 486 adolescent psychiatric inpatients. Preliminary comparison of these data with previously published data for adolescent nonpatients suggested no meaningful differences in overall symptom severity, although the data suggested higher Positive Symptom Distress Index (PSDI) scores for inpatients, less severe somatization and psychoticism symptoms for inpatient males compared to nonpatient males, and more severe depressive symptoms for inpatient females compared to nonpatient females. Future studies should be directed toward further analyses of such data and the development of representative and generalizable adolescent inpatient norms for the SCL-90-R.     

Rate of forgetting in mild Alzheimer's-type dementia

Patients with mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and matched controls were examined for rate of forgetting line drawings of common objects. DAT patients demonstrated rapid forgetting in the first 10 min after learning to criterion. This finding is discussed with respect to memory consolidation and neuropathologic changes in dementia of the Alzheimer's type.     

I-ness and Otherness: A review of Dan Zahavi's Self-Awareness and Alterity

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Executive function, intellectual decline and daily living skills

Understanding the cognitive changes associated with compromised daily living skills in elderly individuals is important for making appropriate recommendations about the capacity for independent functioning. To this end, we retrospectively examined data from 92 elderly individuals presenting with cognitive decline who were administered measures of executive functioning, general intelligence, and daily living skills. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between executive functioning and daily living skills, while controlling for age, depression, and either IQ decline or current IQ. Executive functioning accounted for additional variance in a broad range of daily living skills after controlling for IQ decline. When FSIQ was used in the regression model rather than IQ decline, executive functioning was no longer uniquely associated with daily living skills. Executive functions appear to be important for daily living skills until a critical threshold of low intellectual functioning is reached, reflecting the combined influence of premorbid ability and the extent of intellectual decline. Our results suggest that understanding the relative contribution of different cognitive domains to functional decline in elderly individuals should take into account general intellectual functioning and estimated decline, and that the initiation and/or persistence of self-directed cognitive processes may be important for adaptive daily functioning. These findings have implications for making more evidence-based recommendations about the capacity for independent living.