ABSTRACT
Fifty adults with mental retardation completed the Cognitive Assessment System and the Facial Discrimination Task. Performances on the Facial Discrimination Task Emotion and Age Tasks were significantly correlated to the Cognitive Assessment System total score. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that processing of emotional stimuli was related to simultaneous and successive processing; whereas attention and planning failed to add significantly. The Emotion and Age Tasks yielded similar results, suggesting that cognitive processes are involved in processing facial stimuli in a similar way regardless of the type of facial cues involved. The results are discussed vis-à-vis modular models of emotion, future research directions, and the Age Task as a control task.
Subject(s)
Attention/physiology , Brain/physiopathology , Cognition Disorders/diagnosis , Facial Expression , Intellectual Disability/physiopathology , Recognition, Psychology/physiology , Adult , Humans , Middle Aged , Neuropsychological TestsABSTRACT
The Facial Discrimination Task (FDT) (Erwin, R.J., Gur, R.C., Gur, R. E., Skolnick, B., Mawhinney-Hee, M., Smailis, J., 1992. Facial emotion discrimination: I. Task construction and behavioural findings in normal participants. Psychiatry Research 42, 231-240.) consists of standardized black-and-white photographs of Caucasian actors exhibiting happy, sad, and neutral faces. Originally designed for brain-imaging research in emotion recognition in schizophrenia and major depression, it has since been successfully employed in emotion recognition studies on mental retardation and psychosomatic disorders. This article presents new basic psychometric data from three studies with a total of 401 college undergraduates. Content validity, item reliability (test-retest, item-total correlation, item difficulty) and test reliability (internal consistency) were established. Happy and sad items were easier to agree upon than neutral ones. In general, happy items had the highest validity, highest test-retest reliability, and highest item-total correlations. Recognition errors of neutral items were biased toward negative affect. Advantages and limitations of the FDT for clinical research applications are discussed.
Subject(s)
Affect , Cognition/physiology , Facial Expression , Adult , Female , Humans , Male , Psychometrics/statistics & numerical data , Reproducibility of Results , Visual Perception/physiologyABSTRACT
We have successfully applied the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine in patients with primary biliary cirrhosis and in some patients with chronic active hepatitis. After several years of treatment, we have found a histologic remission tendency in cirrhotic alteration of some patients. This observation indicates that cyclosporine could have protective effects against fibrosis or cirrhotic alteration. To clarify this, we treated Sprague-Dawley rats in which the cirrhotic alteration of the liver was induced by injection of 0.5 ml/kg body weight carbon tetrachloride intramuscularly twice a week with cyclosporine (orally); the control animals were given saline solution instead of cyclosporine. After 6 weeks, we examined the liver histologically to determine the grade of fibrosis and cirrhosis and the grade of fatty degeneration; in group 2 we gave 1 mg/kg body weight cyclosporine daily, and in group 3 it was given every second day. We found excellent protective effects of cyclosporine against cirrhotic alteration in both groups compared with the control group. In group 3 only 25% of the animals showed grade 3 fibrosis and cirrhosis; however, the rate in the control animals (group 4) was 64.3%. In the daily application of cyclosporine (group 2) we found reduced effects of the drug compared with group 3. In group 1 we ordered 10 mg/kg body weight cyclosporine, which causes severe hepatotoxicity. In group 5, animals with hepatic damage from carbon tetrachloride were treated from the third week with cyclosporine. The effect of cyclosporine was not as beneficial compared with the groups in which we ordered cyclosporine from the first week. These results suggest excellent anticirrhotic effects of cyclosporine. This drug should be ordered as early as possible in the treatment of chronic hepatic damage and in an adequate minimal dosage.
