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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Distinguishing depression from dementia in later life
— a pilot study employing the Emotional Stroop task | | Author(s) | Robert Dudley, John O'Brien, Nicholas Barnett |
| Journal title | International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, vol 17, no 1, January 2002 |
| Pages | pp pp 48-53 |
| Keywords | Mental clarity ; Mental speed ; Depression ; Dementia ; Evaluation. |
| Annotation | 12 older people who fulfilled DSM-IV criteria for major depression were compared with 12 people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 12 age-matched controls on a test of cognitive biases: the Emotional Stroop task. In this task, participants were presented with words printed in different coloured inks, and they had to name the printed colour. Four types of material were presented: neutral, positive, and negative emotion words, also meaningless symbols. Those with depression and those with AD were both slower than the controls on the task generally. However, the depressed group alone showed a statistically significant and specific increase in response time when colour naming the negative emotion words. The other two groups did not demonstrate such a pattern and colour named neutral, positive and negative words equally quickly. Although the Emotional Stroop task in its present form is not sufficient for such a purpose, the biased processing of depression-related material may have a valuable role in distinguishing depression from dementia in later life. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020212214 A |
| Classmark | DF: DG: ENR: EA: 4C |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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