Verbal Learning and Memory in Elderly Depressives

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
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).

This publication has 15 references indexed in Scilit: