Increasing the electrical dosage increases the efficacy of right unilateral electroconvulsive therapy, although not to the level of bilateral therapy. High electrical dosage is associated with a more rapid response, and unilateral treatment is associated with less severe cognitive side effects after treatment.

SID existed across this sample of youths with psychotic disorder, and were specifically related to typical characteristics of schizophrenia, such as negative symptoms and lower intelligence, but not to features of bipolar disorder, such as grandiosity. SID is a characteristic of early onset psychosis that may be useful for prognostic purposes.

These analyses demonstrated independent relationships of Smell Identification Test scores to social drive and intelligence that together accounted for almost 50% of the variance in Smell Identification Test scores. There may be common neural substrates for the low social drive and SIDs in schizophrenia.

Sources of discrepancy between the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were investigated in 114 depressed inpatients treated with electroconvulsive therapy. Three previously reported observations were found to occur within the same sample: (a) There was only a moderate baseline correlation between the measures; (b) this correlation improved markedly at later assessment; (c) the HRSD had a greater effect size for change. The modest baseline correlation was largely due to patients who rated themselves as substantially less depressed than clinicians had rated them. Improvement in the correlation with repeated assessment was due to the representation of clinical responders. The larger effect size with the HRSD was mainly attributable to a small subgroup that showed marked deterioration on the BDI, a phenomenon not observed with clinician evaluation.

This study examined whether patients with major depressive disorder manifest deficits in intelligence during affective episodes and following clinical improvement. WAIS-R scores were contrasted in 100 patients in an episode of major depression with 50 normal controls, matched to the patient sample in terms of demographic variables and estimates of premorbid IQ. The groups were equivalent in verbal IQ, but, in line with previous studies, the depressed patients had a pronounced deficit in performance IQ. A patient subsample was administered the WAIS-R under unlimited time conditions to determine whether the time constraints of performance IQ subtests contributed to the magnitude of the verbal-performance IQ discrepancy. This discrepancy was only slightly reduced with untimed scoring. Subgroups of depressed patients were retested with the WAIS-R within one week (n = 26) or two months (n = 33) following treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. In both subsamples, IQ scores were improved at posttreatment testing relative to pretreatment, but with little change in the verbal-performance IQ discrepancy. These and related findings suggested that a performance IQ deficit is characteristic of depressed patients regardless of affective state.