The present study examined the ability of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a cognitive screening test commonly employed in research and clinical applications, to predict level of performance on a comprehensive neuropsychological battery, the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (LNNB). The tests were administered to a diagnostically mixed sample of 90 psychiatric inpatients. Correlations between the tests were statistically significant but modest and the MMSE was not able to detect many patients who demonstrated significant deficits on the LNNB. Additional correlational analyses between the MMSE and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised in a subset of patients (n = 72) also showed a modest relationship between these instruments. The results suggest that the MMSE may seriously underestimate cognitive impairment in samples exclusively composed of psychiatric patients, making it inappropriate to rely solely on this instrument to distinguish psychiatric patients with and without cognitive deficit.

Modal profile analysis was used to cluster subjects on 11 scores from the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery. The final analysis produced 18 modal profile types, of which 12 were replicated in multiple samples of subjects with differing clinical diagnoses. Subjects who had been assigned to modal types according to their correlations with the modal profiles were more similar to the centroid of their assigned groups than to the centroids of all other groups. Assigned subjects were eight times more likely to belong to their assigned groups than to any of the other groups. Fifty-four percent of subjects were assigned to a modal profile group according to the adopted similarity rule. Discussion includes a comparison of the present typology with a similar typology of Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery profiles.

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