Date of Award
Fall 1980
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Education
First Advisor
Ivanoff, John
Abstract
The investigation of the cognitive aspects of functional disorders provided an ex post facto design where twenty psychotic psychiatric subjects! twenty non-psychotic psychiatric subjects and twenty normal subjects were tested with fifteen brain sensitive cognitive based tests. These tests were all individually validated with organic groups. Psychotic subjects were defined as subjects who were actively hallucinating. The subjects were matched by sex, race (white), mean age (34.1), and mean education (12.9 years). Two major questions were investigated by this study. 1) This study examined the general notion that there were no significant differences between psychotic psychiatric, non-psychotic psychiatric and normal groups on cognitive neuropsychological tests. 2) This study investigated questions specific to cortical geographic entities or types of cognitive functioning that differentiated the psychotic group from other groups. The cognitive test scores were analyzed by ANOVA and MANOVA designs with the independent variable being the severity of the functional disorder. Eleven of the fifteen task performances were significant (p < .05) in differentiating among the three groups in ANOVA design. The mean number of tests failed was psychotic> non-psychotic> normal. Three t tests using mean number of test failures showed significant differences between each possible pair of groups. The cognitive tasks were grouped and found significant by·MANOVA designs in the categories of attention concentration tasks, cognitive speed tasks, memory and learning tasks, right hemisphere or spatial tasks, and frontal lobe tasks. The task categorizations not found significant were the left hemisphere or language oriented tasks and the posterior oriented tasks. Distributions of the scores were provided for more applied use...