Browsing by Author "Anderson, Stuart James."

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The effects of alcoholic hangover on human performance
(2000) Hartshorne, Claire.; Anderson, Stuart James.
This dissertation aims at determining the possible effects of alcoholic hangover on human behaviour by examining the effects of acute alcohol consumption (> 1g/kg) 14-16 hours following alcohol ingestion on simple and choice reaction times, divided attention tasks and driving skills. The hypotheses are that cognitive and behavioural functioning is impaired even after the blood alcohol concentration level has returned to zero The California Computerised Assessment Package (CALCAP) together with selected driving skills tasks, repeated breath analysis measures, a biographical questionnaire, a subjective hangover rating scale, and blood glucose tests were administered to a group of 63 mixed gender student volunteers. The experimental group and was tested prior to, and during hangover. The control group was pre- and post-tested in order to determif.le the impact of practice effects. Results indicate that hangover individuals performed less well than control subjects on measures of reaction time and driving precision. Further more, the findings show that subjective experience of hangover is not a good predictor of reaction time or driving performance, and that the absence of hangover symptoms does not guarantee full mental recovery. Statistical analysis of the data showed that post-test findings could not be attributed to a gender effect.
Neuropsychological correlates of chronic fatigue syndrome.
(1997) Anderson, Stuart James.; Budek, Michael.; Lindegger, Graham Charles.
Neuropsychological deficits have been implicated in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and there is some indication that cerebral efficiency is compromised in these patients. To further investigate the nature of this impairment, 20 patients who had received a medical diagnosis of CFS were neuropsychologically assessed and compared with age-, sex-, and education-matched controls (20 depressed and 20 healthy subjects). The test battery consisted of the Grooved Pegboard Trail Making Test, Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Auditory-Verbal Learning Test, Visual Design Learning Test, Controlled Oral Word Association Test and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task. Additional measures included a CFS symptom checklist, SCL-90-R and Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). Univariate statistical analysis revealed a significant difference between CFS patients and healthy individuals on only one measure; the "S" trial of the COWAT (F[2,59]=3.30, p <.05). This finding suggests the existence of subtle but detectable neuropsychological difficulty in executive or attentional mechanisms in CFS patients. Further analysis revealed that the observed finding could not be attributed to depression or medication side-effects. Although a trend of declining neuropsychological test performance was evident in moving across the spectrum of healthy, depressed, and CFS samples, this reached significance only for the CFS/depressed versus healthy comparison X22 [1] = 9.40, p < .05). The overall similarity of the neuropsychological profiles of CFS and depressed patients was noted, while an additional finding was the discrepancy between reported levels of subjective cognitive failure (CFQ) and objective neuropsychological findings in the CFS patients. The SCL-90-R profiles of the CFS and depressed patients were also found to be similar in terms of reported levels of psychological distress; however group discrimination was evident on two subscales (Somatization and Obsessive-Compulsive). Although the CFS and depressed controls did not differ with respect to levels of depression, there were some indications of a differential impact of depressive symptomatology on neuropsychological functioning. Taken together, the results of this study indicate that while subtle deficits are detectable in the neuropsychological profiles of CPS patients, the magnitude of impairment appears insufficient to significantly interfere with everyday cognitive functioning.
Translation, psychometric evaluation, and preliminary validation of a Zulu version of the SCL-90-R.
(1998) Shanahan, Sean Francis.; Anderson, Stuart James.
This study is seen as a step towards addressing the acute shortage of psychometric instruments that can be validly and reliably used in the assessment of Zulu-speaking individuals. The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) , a 90-item multidimensional self-report symptom inventory, was translated into Zulu. A multistage translation procedure, involving back-translation, decentering, and the committee approach was employed. The translated instrument was pretested on a group of Zulu farm workers (N = 12) and revisions made in order to improve its comprehensibility and acceptability to Zulu respondents. The psychometric equivalence of the Zulu and English versions of the SCL-90-R was investigated with bilingual Zulu students (N = 61) . Scale-level factor analysis yielded similar factor structures for both versions, and suggests that the Zulu SCL-90-R may be best utilised as a global measure of psychological distress. Scores at the scale- and item-level were reasonably comparable for the two language versions, although retest effects and apparent bilingual response sets suggest that the bilingual technique may not be a valid means of assessing translation equivalence. Acceptable test-retest reliability and internal consistency measures were obtained, indicating that the translation into Zulu did not adversely affect the reliability of the SCL-90-R. The concurrent validity of the Zulu SCL-90-R was investigated with samples of male psychiatric inpatients (N = 23) and nonpatients (N = 26). The global severity index of the SCL-90-R demonstrated moderate diagnostic efficiency, with a sensitivity of 70% and a specificity of 77%. These results suggest that the Zulu SCL-90-R may be validly utilised for the purpose of screening for mental illness.