American journal of mental deficiency最新文献

Twenty-two moderately and severely mentally retarded adolescents and 22 nonretarded children participated in an experiment designed to examine processes contributing to matching-to-sample deficits of low mental age (MA) retarded persons. One-half of the subjects rehearsed color, form, and size cues during delay intervals. Nonretarded subjects performed better than did retarded subjects on immediate and delayed retention tests. There was no difference in rate of forgetting, and rehearsal improved delayed test performance equally for both groups. Although immediate test results indicated that low-MA persons are capable of multiple-looking, these results also suggest that retarded persons attend to fewer dimensions than do nonretarded children.

The relationship between employee turnover and performance was measured for 144 leavers and 144 stayers across 32 positions in a large institution for mentally retarded people. Performance ratings for employees leaving the organization were significantly lower than for those who stayed. These performance differences occurred most significantly with involuntary dismissals and among direct-care technicians who comprise a major part of the institution's work force. The overall results suggest that the organization is not ejecting its best workers and that a substantial portion of the turnover is functional.

Performance of 344 institutionalized mentally retarded adults was measured to assess the applicability of the Dyskinesia Identification System Condensed User Scale. A larger proportion of profoundly retarded persons cooperated with Dyskinesia Identification examination procedures than has previously been found. Performance deficits were observed on activation tasks (APA, 1979) that precede assessment of lingual abnormal involuntary movements. Intelligence quotients, neuroleptic dosage, gender, and ambulatory and visual impairments were associated with performance of activation tasks. Results suggest the difficulty of implementing standardized tardive dyskinesia assessments and that client behavior problems may threaten the valid assessment of this disorder among institutionalized profoundly retarded persons.

Two groups of 3- to 5-year-old children, a nonretarded and a Down syndrome group, were tested six times over 2.5 months on three Piagetian infant search tasks. Two opposing trends in performance over sessions were evident: Scores of children in the Down syndrome group increased significantly whereas the performance of nonretarded subjects declined. The data suggest that cognitive ability of children with Down syndrome may be poorly measured by single-session testing; also, that in the absence of normative data from nonretarded children, caution is necessary in evaluating the performance of children with mental retardation on tests designed for and validated on younger, nonretarded subjects.

Adaptive Behavior Scale (ABS) Part One ratings by one rater who completed the entire scale was compared with the composite rating by a group of raters, each of whom completed only a portion of the ABS. Individual and composite ratings were obtained for 40 retarded clients. In using total scores, we found that composite ratings were significantly higher than individual ratings.

Adaptive skills of 2,144 individuals with Down syndrome were compared to a similar group of 4,172 developmentally disabled people without Down syndrome. Activities of daily living and cognitive skills were examined across etiology, age group, and level of mental retardation. For individuals with Down syndrome at all levels of retardation, adaptive competence declined with increasing age to a greater extent than for retarded control subjects. Clear age-related deficits associated with Down syndrome were observed only in people older than 50 years of age. Findings support previous evidence of an increased risk for the clinical signs of Alzheimer's disease among people with Down syndrome; however, signs of dementia appeared later in life than would be predicted from available neuropathological data.