Emotional correlates of fluency test and Maze performance

Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that depression, anxiety, and bizarre thought content, as measured by MMPI‐2 scales, would show a negative relationship with performance on widely used measures of executive functioning. Subjects were 70 male psychiatric patients who were ostensibly free of any neurologic disease or history of substance abuse. Correlational analyses were performed between age and education‐corrected scores on the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (FAS), Design Fluency, and WISC‐R Mazes, and scores on MMPI‐2 scales D, PT, Anxiety, Fears, Obsessional Thinking, Depression, and Bizarre Mentation. The findings suggest that fluency and maze performance is (1) largely independent of measures of depression (D, DEP) and bizarre mentation (BIZ); (2) mildly associated with a measure of generalized anxiety (ANX); and (3) strongly related to an MMPI‐2 measure of fearfulness (FRS).

Affective state and cognitive functioning in patients with intracranial tumors: validity of the neuropsychological baseline assessment

“…This task measures verbal working memory and thus puts very high demands on higher cognitive control processes (e.g., in terms of the ‘central executive’ in the working memory model of Baddeley and Hitch ). Thus, this finding is again in concordance with previous research in which higher levels of anxiety have been associated with lower performance in cognitive measures highly dependent on attentional resources . As the digit span task is highly sensitive to test effort , this might also be due to incomplete effort, which, however, cannot be answered on the basis of our data.…”

“…On the one hand, associations between anxiety and cognition were reported in a variety of different patient samples as well as in healthy subjects . This has, for example, been attributed to the higher arousal, the lower capacity to monitor cognitive performance, or the higher frequency of intrusive thoughts in anxious subjects . Also, associations between depression and traumatic stress reactions as well as cognitive functioning have been reported in the literature .…”

Psychological Disturbance, Incomplete Effort, and Compensation-Seeking Status as Predictors of Neuropsychological Test Performance in Head Injury

“…A number of studies indicate that psychological factors are related to many domains of NP performance, including attention (Putzke et al 1997;Ross, Putnam, Gass, Bailey, & Adams, 2003), memory (Burt, Zembar, & Niederehe, 1995;Putzke et al, 1997;, executive functioning (Gass, Ansley, & Boyette, 1994), and general intelligence (Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997;Wrobel & Wrobel, 1996). Most of these studies have found modest to moderate relationships between psychological disturbance and performance on NP tests and have focused on the assessment of patients with head injury.…”

Further exploration of the effect of “diagnosis threat” on cognitive performance in individuals with mild head injury

“…Steele and colleagues (Steele, 1997;Steele & Aronson, 1995) have suggested that this effect is possibly mediated by increasing anxiety, causing distraction and0or less efficient cognitive processing, or by reducing effort provided on the cognitive tasks. There is evidence that anxiety and stress can lead to diminished cognitive performance (Baumeister & Showers, 1984;Gass, 2002;Gass et al, 1994;Gass & Daniel, 1990;Geen, 1991;Sarason, 1980). However, evidence for the relation of anxiety to cognitive performance under stereotype threat conditions is mixed at best, with several studies showing no relation (Aronson et al, 1999;Hess et al, 2003;Steele & Aronson, 1995), and others suggesting that anxiety may partially explain the effect (Osborne, 2001, Spencer et al, 1999.…”