The relationships between mild hearing losses and cognitive functioning were studied for two independently selected samples of aged subjects whose hearing was within normal limits. One group had 47 males of mean age 71.5 (SD 4.8) who were selected for their excellent health status. The second group consisted of 38 females of mean age 75.9 (SD 5.3), all of whom had some significant physical pathology. Hearing losses at various frequency levels (from 125 to 8000 cps) were correlated with performance on cognitive tests such as the WAIS, with age effects then being partialled out. The results reveal substantial associations between hearing losses and scores achieved on the intellectual measures for both samples. Verbal type tests show these relationships much more extensively than the performance tests. The findings imply that aged subjects may be more intellectually capable than their test performances suggest and that hearing is an important variable to be considered in the assessment of their cognitive functioning.

No abstract

Philadelphia Psychiatric Center 50 psychotic depressives, matched to a group of SO normals for age, sex, race, education, religion, and nativity, are compared for performance on WAIS Information and Similarities, and on Thorndike-Gallup Vocabulary. Intergroup differences are not significant, but the normals tend to score higher on all tests. Pattern of performance is similar for both groups. Weighted information scores are significantly higher than Similarities scores, at the .01 level, for both the normals and depressives. A precipitate drop in quality of performance on the Similarities is found in relation to increasing age within the 2 groups. The age factor is, thus, found to be more potent than depression in producing psychometric deficit, particularly in the area of abstraction and flexibility of thought processes.

An abbreviated version of Rotter's Locus of Control (LOC) Scale was administered to 437 elderly subjects living in a variety of settings in an urban community. The group (n = 199) which scored below the median (internal orientation) was compared with the group (n = 238) which scored at or above the median (external orientation) on an array of 37 cognitive and psychosocial variables. Significant differences, mostly favoring the internal subjects, were found on 13 of the variables, suggesting relatively better self-reported health status, cognitive, and personal-social functioning on their part. These results are in general agreement with most other reports dealing with the relationships between LOC responses of the aged and their psychosocial functioning. Step-wise multiple regression analysis of the intercorrelations among the 37 variables and LOC show only seven are significant and these account for no more than 13 percent of the variance. The overall impression is that LOC has a reliable relationship to limited aspects of cognitive and psychosocial functioning, but that the power of its predictive effectiveness is still quite limited.

No abstract