The effect of providing recreational activities on the engagement level of long-stay geriatric patients

The relative effectiveness of providing individual and group activities, as compared to conditions of non-intervention, was studied on a long-stay female geriatric ward. Engagement levels were consistently higher during the sessions when activities were provided. Group activities raised engagement levels more than individual activities. This suggests that levels of engagement are normally low because patients are not provided and encouraged with activities, rather than through disability.

Attitude change during behavioural treatment of sexual inadequacy

Attitudes towards 'self' and 'partner' were studied in couples undergoing three different behavioural treatments for sexual inadequacy: systematic desensitization with counselling; guided practice with counselling; and practice with minimal counselling. Factor analysis of semantic differential scales identified five components--general evaluation, anxiety, and three factors relevant to sexual evaluation designated as 'loving', 'sexually attractive' and 'easy to arouse'. Differences in derived factor scores were found which related to sex of rater, identity of complainant, and treatment received; with the treatment combining guided practice with counselling being followed by significantly greater attitude changes.

Changes in cognitive functioning in elderly psychiatric patients

Elderly psychiatric patients who were in contact with the hospital one year after in-patient admission were retested on a number of clinical and psychometric measures first done soon after admission. In general, changes were small; and for several measures very high correlations existed between the scores gained on the two occasions. When those patients with uncomplicated chronic brain syndromes were considered separately, increasing impairment was demonstrable.

The treatment of soil infested with the human whipworm, Trichuris trichiura

The soil fumigants methyl bromide, chloropircrin and Basamid or mixtures of Basamid and chloropicrin proved to be of no use in filling T. trichiura ova in soil. However, on untreated plots the eggs died at a rate such than only 20% of the ova remained viable after 18 months.

The prediction of outcome in elderly psychiatric patients

Clinical and psychometric characteristics of a sample of elderly psychiatric patients were established soon after admission and they were then followed for 1 year. An attempt to predict outcome was most successful for an unfavourable type which was predictable by measures related to intellectual impairment.

Recognition memory in dementia

The experiment was designed to look at the effects of two parameters on the recognition memory of dementing subjects. These were a forced-choice compared with a free format; and verbal compared with pictorial material. For the entire sample, neither of the comparisons gave significant differences; when those subjects with the best recognition scores were considered separately, the forced-choice condition was found to give significantly better scores; but there was still no significant tendency in favour of the pictorial material.

Verbal learning and memory in elderly depressives

Tasks involving verbal learning and memory are widely used in the differential diagnosis of depressive and dementing conditions. That dements suffer widespread impairments of these functions is self-evident, yet depressives also evince some degree of deficit. For elderly patients suffering from affective illnesses Bolton, Savage and Roth (1967) found 29 per cent to gain organic scores on the Modified New Word Learning Test; of elderly depressives, 16 per cent gained scores in the organic range on the Synonym Learning Test (Kendrick, Parboo-singh and Post, 1965), and this figure increased to over three-quarters when a group was selected to contain a large proportion of patients clinically judged as suffering from ‘pseudo-dementia’ (Kendrick, 1967).

Barbiturate tolerance and psychological functioning in elderly depressed patients

Increases in barbiturate tolerance and in scores on certain cognitive tests were found to have occurred after the treatment of elderly depressives. These changes were related to original severity of illness and to the extent of improvement, as well as to a number of other clinical features including age at first attack. The reported findings lent support to theories linking depressive illness with reduction in cortical arousability.