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The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Third Edition (WAIS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997a) and the Wechsler Memory Scale--Third Edition (WMS-III; D. Wechsler, 1997b) are 2 of the most frequently used measures in psychology and neuropsychology. To facilitate the diagnostic use of these measures in the clinical decision-making process, this article provides information on education-stratified, directional prevalence rates (i.e., base rates) of discrepancy scores between the major index scores for the WAIS-III, the WMS-III, and between the WAIS-III and WMS-III. To illustrate how such base-rate data can be clinically used, this article reviews the relative risk (i.e., odds ratio) of empirically defined "rare" cognitive deficits in 2 of the clinical samples presented in the WAIS-III--WMS-III Technical Manual (The Psychological Corporation, 1997).

We describe five cases of traumatic asphyxiation injury, each meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and characterized by a range of postinjury cognitive impairment. Four patients exhibited dense retrograde amnesia, including absence of conscious memory for the traumatic event. Appreciation of these asphyxiation cases, which involve temporally extended trauma exposure, may help resolve arguments regarding the possibility of co-occurrence of PTSD and neurological amnesia based exclusively on observations of much briefer duration events (specifically, motor vehicle crashes). These five cases also provide evidence that cognitive symptoms of PTSD can develop in the absence of conscious memory for the event.

The Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition has been validated in numerous populations and is the most widely used depression assessment tool in research and in practice. The obvious nature of its items makes the instrument vulnerable to intentional efforts to distort one's level of depression. The purpose of this study was to examine the relative resistance to intentional response distortion on the BDI-II in comparison to a modified Stroop procedure involving the color naming of depression relevant words. Mildly depressed and non-depressed participants were asked to present themselves as either depressed or non-depressed on each of the two instruments. Each participant was provided with a vignette that encouraged them to respond in a depressed or non-depressed manner. Thus, the study involved a 2 x 2 design with two levels of affect (depressed and non-depressed) and two levels of response distortion (in a depressed or non-depressed direction). Study results indicated that both depressed and non-depressed participants were able to intentionally alter their responses to appear more or less depressed on the BDI-II but were unable to do this on the modified Stroop.