Anxiety symptoms bias memory assessment in older adults.

BACKGROUND: Older adults with anxiety and/or depression experience additional memory dysfunction beyond that of the normal aging process. However, few studies have examined test bias in memory assessments due to anxiety and/or depressive symptoms. The current study investigated the influence of self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression on the measurement equivalence of memory tests in older adults. METHOD: This is a secondary analysis of the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly dataset, a randomized controlled trial of community-dwelling older adults. Baseline data were included in this study (n = 2802). Multiple indicators multiple causes modeling was employed to assess for measurement equivalence, differential item functioning (DIF), in memory tests. RESULTS: The DIF was present for anxiety symptoms but not for depressive symptoms, such that higher anxiety placed older adults at a disadvantage on measures of memory performance. Analysis of DIF impact showed that compared with participants scoring in the bottom quartile of anxious symptoms, participants in the upper quartile exhibited memory performance scores that were 0.26 standard deviation lower. CONCLUSION: Anxious but not depressive symptoms introduce test bias into the measurement of memory in older adults. This indicates that memory models for research and clinical purposes should account for the direct relationship between anxiety symptoms and memory tests in addition to the true relationship between anxiety symptoms and memory construct. These findings support routine assessments of anxiety symptoms among older adults in settings in which cognitive testing is being conducted. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Symptoms of depression and cognitive functioning in older American Indians.

Depression and lower cognitive functioning are common conditions in older populations. While links between psychopathology and neuropsychological performance have been studied in the white majority population, little is known about such links in the American Indian population. American Indians aged 60 and older (n=140) completed structured interviews that included a depression screener and two cognitive screening measures, the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (MDRS). Participants had mean values of 26.7/30 on the MMSE and 125.8/144 on the MDRS. The depression screen was not associated with the MMSE or MDRS total scores. However, older American Indians who screened positive for depression scored lower than did those American Indians who screened negatively for depression (27.7 versus 29.8 respectively) on the MDRS conceptualization subscale after adjusting for sociodemographic and health variables. The combined effects of psychopathology and cognitive impairment are likely to adversely impact the health and welfare of American Indians and their families. More research is needed to provide a better understanding of the relationship between psychopathology and cognition that will help inform clinical treatment for psychopathology in older ethnic minorities.

Pupillary responses and processing resources on the visual backward masking task.

Task-evoked pupillary responses were recorded during a visual backward masking task as an index of resource allocation. Increased pupillary dilation indicates increased allocation of processing resources to the task. Consistent with numerous studies, detection accuracy increased with longer interstimulus intervals and approximated no-mask accuracy in the 300-ms condition. Pupillary dilation responses were significantly greater during task performance (cognitive load) than during a passive stimulus viewing condition (no-load) and were significantly greater in the 300-ms condition than the no-mask condition. Consistent with models of early visual information processing, the results suggest that the mask demanded extra processing resources when it followed the target by more than 100 ms. Pupillography methods may be useful in evaluating the contribution and timing of resource-demanding processes during early visual information processing.

Span of apprehension deficits in older outpatients with schizophrenia.

Performance on the span of apprehension task, a well-studied information processing task in schizophrenia research, was examined in 11 schizophrenia patients and 11 normal comparison participants, all over the age of 45 years. Subjects detected "T' and "F' targets in briefly-flashed arrays of 1, 6, and 12 letters on the span task. Consistent with previously reported findings in younger schizophrenia patients, the older patients detected significantly fewer targets in the larger (12-letter), but not smaller (1-, or 6-letter), arrays. The older schizophrenia patients also showed significantly slower reaction times in all array-size conditions. Neither age of onset nor duration of illness was significantly correlated with span task performance. The characteristic span of apprehension task deficit found in the older schizophrenia patients suggests that late-life schizophrenia shares a common cognitive impairment with childhood and young adulthood schizophrenia, and provides supportive evidence for a possible stable vulnerability trait deficit in schizophrenia that is independent of age of onset and duration of illness.

Unconscious mood-congruent memory bias in depression.

The purpose of this study was to investigate an unconscious or implicit mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in clinical depression. Many studies have shown an explicit memory bias, but no study has yet found an implicit MCM bias in clinical depression. The authors compared depressed and control group participants on a conceptually driven implicit memory test. After studying words of positive, neutral, and negative affective valences, participants produced free associations to various cues. Implicit memory or priming was demonstrated by the production of more studied than unstudied words to the association cues. Depressed participants showed more priming of negative words, whereas controls showed more priming of positive words, thus supporting the MCM pattern. Also, no implicit memory deficit was found in depressed participants. These findings are discussed in the context of several prominent theories of cognition and depression.