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THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL TEST PERFORMANCE OF AN ASSAULTIVE PSYCHIATRIC POPULATION
Abstract
The purpose of the present study is to examine the performance on neuropsychological tests of psychiatric patients with histories of assaultive behavior. Previous research into the neurological functioning of assaultive individuals has found a high incidence of damage to structures of the limbic system, particularly of the temporal lobes, in such individuals. To date, virtually all of the studies in this area have utilized neurological measures such as the EEG. The neuropsychological measures in the present study are not only sensitive to the functioning of most areas of the cerebral cortex, but also provide an inventory of cognitive functions which may be useful for psychosocial rehabilitation. In this study, 71 male patients with histories of assaultive behavior hospitalized in the security unit of a midwestern state hospital and 120 males from open psychiatric units of other midwestern hospitals and 30 males hospitalized for non-neurological medical reasons were administered the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery and demographic questionnaires. Groups of assaultive and non-assaultive subjects matched for age, education and diagnosis were compared on Luria-Nebraska performance in a series of separate studies. Study 1 compared 20 assaultive and 24 non-assaultive schizophrenics, Study 2 compared 14 personality-disordered sexual sociopaths and 17 medically-hospitalized normals, and Study 3 compared 50 assaultive and 53 non-assaultive subjects from various diagnostic groups. The last three studies compared assaultive subjects divided on the basis of arrest records into high- and low-assaultive groups. Study 4 compared 8 high-assaultive and 10 low-assaultive schizophrenics, Study 5 compared 7 high-assaultive and 7 low-assaultive sexual sociopaths, and Study 6 compared the combined low-assaultive subjects from the preceding studies with the combined high-assaultive subjects from those studies. The results of these studies showed: (1) an apparent interaction between diagnosis and assaultiveness on the dependent variable of neuropsychological performance, with assaultive schizophrenics performing more poorly than non-assaultive schizophrenics, but sexual sociopaths performing better than matched medically-hospitalized normals; (2) a tendency for the most assaultive groups to show slight-to-mild impairment, with high-arrest sexual sociopaths and schizophrenics performing in this range while low-arrest schizophrenics showed more impairment and low-arrest sexual sociopaths showed less; (3) a consistent pattern of relative strengths on Expressive Language and Reading and relative deficits on Receptive Language, Writing and Arithmetic characterized assaultive subjects across diagnostic groups; and (4) assaultive subjects showed a tendency to perform more poorly on items sensitive to temporal lobe functioning than on items sensitive to the functioning of other cortical areas. These findings are interpreted as providing some support for the hypothesis of an increased incidence of temporal lobe deficits in an assaultive population. The findings are also interpreted as suggesting that some assaultive individuals may experience considerable frustration and failure as a result of deficits in receiving and understanding verbal information, frustration which may be heightened by the intactness of superficially-observable speech and motor skills in these individuals. Several shortcomings of the study are discussed, including the possible confounding of assaultiveness with psychiatric disturbance on the dependent variable of neuropsychological performance and the possible averaging of the performance of brain-damaged and non-brain damaged individuals in the group comparisons.
Subject Area
Psychotherapy
Recommended Citation
MCKAY, STEPHEN EMERSON, "THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL TEST PERFORMANCE OF AN ASSAULTIVE PSYCHIATRIC POPULATION" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8109986.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8109986