Philip T. Smith

Coping, depressive feelings and gender differences in late life widowhood.

The study investigated the relationship between depressive feelings and coping amongst older widowed men and women. Participants were interviewed about their affective experiences of widowhood and completed two depression questionnaire assessments, the Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression Scale (SAD) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Participants were assessed as either coping or not coping. The results showed that both measures were effective at differentiating those who coped (Copers) from those who did not (Non-Copers) in the sample as a whole. Amongst the widows the HADS significantly differentiated the two groups. Amongst men, neither measure significantly distinguished Copers from Non-Copers. However, an examination of the interviews suggested that widowers reported depressive feelings significantly more often than widows. The results suggest that depressive feelings are associated with non-coping in older widowed people. There is also evidence to suggest that widows and widowers respond differentially to assessment measures.

Influence of cognitive function on social, domestic, and leisure activities of community-dwelling older people

The Frenchay Activities Index (FAI), a brief scale developed to measure lifestyle in stroke patients, was given to 119 community-dwelling people, aged 70 years or older, in order to obtain a baseline estimate of social, domestic, and leisure activity among older people. Factor analysis identified three main factors, similar in composition to those previously reported. A general linear models regression analysis of selected variables indicated that both fluid intelligence and memory test performance were significantly associated with level of activity. There was no significant association with age or crystallized intelligence in this sample. An apparently strong bias towards higher levels of activity among female respondents was diluted when marital status was included in the equation. This study suggests that the FAI is appropriate for measuring levels of activity in community-dwelling older people and that such activity is related to current cognitive abilities.

Progressive Decline in Nart Score with Increasing Dementia Severity

Although the National Adult Reading Test (NART) is widely used to estimate premorbid intellectual ability in adults with possible or probable dementia, it may be less resilient to the progress of Alzheimers Disease (AD) than was initially assumed. This paper reports performance at four annual assessments of 78 people with either autopsy confirmed (n = 50) or clinical diagnosis of AD (n = 28). Results indicate that NART score does decline over time and that extent of decline is a function of MMSE score on entry to the study but is not dependent on age, education or time post onset of dementia.

The development of the use of long-term knowledge to assist short-term recall.

The influence of item familiarity upon memory span was examined in adults and children aged 5, 7, and 10 years by comparing the recall of words and nonwords. Using a probed recall task, both item recall and position recall were tested. The effect of familiarity upon item recall was found to develop with age, from no effects in the 5-year-olds to significant effects in the older children and adults. By contrast, no effect of familiarity was found at any age when recall of position was required. Dissociations between word length effects and familiarity effects supported the conclusion that the familiarity effect does not result from rehearsal. Several explanations for the source of the familiarity effect were examined, and the familiarity effect was attributed to a strategic redintegration or reconstruction process, which is necessary for item recall but not for position recall.

Spelling Patterns, Letter Cancellation and the Processing of Text

Two experiments are reported in which an attempt is made to identify those parts of words and sentences that readers pay particular attention to during fluent silent reading. Using a technique first reported by Corcoran (1966), we asked university students to cross out all the letter e’s appearing in a text they read. In the first experiment the nature of the text was systematically varied (there were various degrees of difficult, easy, and nonsensical texts); in the second experiment the instructions to subjects were varied (to pay attention to or ignore meaning). The primary results are 1) contrary to Corcoran’s (1966) findings, there is not an acoustic factor in this task (i.e., silent e’s are as readily detected as pronounced e’s); 2) there is a strong tendency, even with the most nonsensical texts, to miss a greater proportion of e’s at the end of words; 3) e’s in unstressed syllables are more likely to be missed than e’s in stressed syllables; 4) there are several grammatical and lexical effects (i.e., the linguistic function of the e to a large extent determines the probability that it will be missed); and 5) the position of a word within a sentence and its position on each line of text also contribute substantially to the probability that any e’s in the word will be missed. The implications of the above results for a theory of reading are discussed. This paper has two aims: to attack the idea that acoustic factors play a significant role in fluent silent reading, and to demonstrate that one of the methods that has been used to investigate acoustic factors is in fact a sensitive tool for studying the micro-structure of the reading process.

Modality effects and the development of the word length effect in children.

Two experiments investigated the development of the word length effect in children aged 4 to 10 years, comparing auditory and visual stimuli. The question addressed was whether word length effects emerged earlier with auditory presentation or visual presentation, or whether they emerged at the same age regardless of presentation modality. Results provided evidence that word length effects emerge earlier with visual than auditory presentation. The implication of our results is that with visual presentation, 4-year-olds engage in some form of verbalisation strategy that involves obtaining phonological representations of picture names and mapping them on to articulatory output plans. This strategy is clearly verbal in nature, but is not necessarily characterised as cumulative verbal rehearsal.

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO LATER LIFE WIDOWHOOD: COPING AND THE EFFECTS OF GENDER*

The study examined the effects of psychological response and gender on coping with late life widowhood. Forty-six men and 46 women (55 years +) were interviewed about their experiences of widowhood. Participants were classified as to whether they were coping well or less well. Data were analyzed using grounded theory, content analysis, and three-way loglinear analyses. Loglinear analyses revealed three-way interactions for Gender, Coping, and Response. Men who report feeling upset or selfish are more likely to be coping, as are women who report being comfortable alone. There were two-way interactions between Coping and Response and Gender and Response. Participants who talk to their dead spouse are more likely to be coping than those who do not. Those who “keep themselves to themselves” are more likely not to be coping than those who do not. Gender differences were found in psychological response. Differences were also found between those who coped and those who coped less well. The study has enabled the synthesis of quantitative and qualitative data to present a more complete view of late life widowhood than has previously been possible. In addition, the article draws attention to the importance of distinguishing between the effects of bereavement and those of widowhood.

A subjective memory assessment questionnaire for use with elderly people after stroke

The aim of this study was to develop a subjective memory questionnaire for use with elderly people after stroke. A 13-item questionnaire was devised using items identified by 10 stroke patients and taken from existing memory questionnaires. It was tested on 50 elderly stroke patients and 50 elderly control subjects. Validation was carried out using the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT) and a significant positive correlation was obtained (r= 0.71 ; p <0.001). The correlation between the subjective rating for the normal elderly subjects and the RBMT was not significant. It was concluded that the questionnaire is valid for use with elderly people after stroke but not for normal elderly subjects. The reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.

Redintegration and lexicality effects in children: Do they depend upon the demands of the memory task?

The effect of long-term knowledge upon performance in short-term memory tasks was examined for children from 5 to 10 years of age. The emergence of a lexicality effect, in which familiar words were recalled more accurately than unfamiliar words, was found to depend upon the nature of the memory task. Lexicality effects were interpreted as reflecting the use of redintegration, or reconstruction processes, in short-term memory. Redintegration increased with age for tasks requiring spoken item recall and decreased with age when position information but not naming was required. In a second experiment, redintegration was found in a recognition task when some of the foils rhymed with the target. Older children were able to profit from a rhyming foil, whereas younger children were confused by it, suggesting that the older children make use of sublexical phonological information in reconstructing the target. It was proposed that redintegrative processes in their mature form support the reconstruction of detailed phonological knowledge of words.

A jigsaw puzzle theory of memory.

The principal novel feature of this paper is the notion that a coherent memory can be synthesised from a set of partially coherent memory fragments by maximising a particular function, Harmony (Smolensky, 1986). The appeal of Harmony is that it fulfils two functions: it is at the heart of the synthesis algorithm and it provides a natural measure for “feeling-of-knowing”. The model is applied to feeling-of-knowing data, flashbulb memories, flashbacks, repression, dissociation, memory stability across repeated recalls, and the effects of cue size on retrieval.