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J J van Hoof

Publications and source records attributed to J J van Hoof.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1993

Figure drawing and psychomotor retardation: preliminary report.

Psychomotor retardation, a general slowing of activity which is one of the central characteristics of depression, was investigated by measuring reaction time and movement duration in drawing tasks. Twenty depressive patients and 20 normal controls participated in two tasks in which either simple or more complex figures had to be copied as fast as possible on a digitizer. In general, patients needed more time to complete the drawing tasks than controls, and they performed them differently. Six patients, who could be tested before and after treatment, showed changes in drawing speed that correlated with clinical improvement. These results suggest that psychomotor retardation might be fruitfully studied by measuring the kinematic aspects of drawing and might provide objective parameters to measure progress in therapy.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Haloperidol and cognitive shifting.

In this study haloperidol appeared to affect the performance on a selected category of cognitive tasks considered to represent shifting aptitude. A pretest--post-test design was used with two groups of subjects: 17 patients suffering from idiopathic spasmodic torticollis, and 17 controls who were matched for age and intelligence. The results are discussed in relation to previous findings on haloperidol and cognition, shifting disorder in Parkinson's disease and changes in behavioural organization found in animals with an experimentally induced dopaminergic hypoactivity.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Spasmodic torticollis: the problem of pathophysiology and assessment.

In 17 patients with idiopathic spasmodic torticollis (ST) quantitative indices for both signs (extent and direction of the head deflexions) and complaints (of deflexion, shaking and pain) were collected. In the literature deflexion in the horizontal plane is most frequently considered, but analysis of the data shows that deflexion in the coronal and sagittal planes is also important. Furthermore, it is found that especially the deflexions in the coronal and sagittal plane covariate with the patients' complaints, but not with horizontal deflexion. On the basis of these and related data, it is suggested that we are dealing with at least two subtypes of ST. Finally, the patient's neuroticism and depression scale values are within the normal range and do not show significant correlations with ST duration. The present study provides no evidence that ST is a psychogenic disorder. ST should be regarded as a central nervous system disorder of unknown aetiology.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Differentiation of cognitive and motor slowing in the Digit Symbol Test (DST): differences between depression and schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia and depression have an overlap in symptomatology, namely a slowing in both motor and mental activities, denoted in depression as 'psychomotor retardation' and in schizophrenia as 'psychomotor poverty'. By means of a new technique that allows the measurement of psychomotor speed and the computerized analysis of writing movements recorded during the performance of the Digit Symbol Test, it indeed proved to be possible to observe a slowing in both disorders. In addition, a different structure of slowing in the two patient groups could be identified.

Adult↗