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Biomedical subjects

S Kunen

Publications and source records attributed to S Kunen.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

Disposition of emergency department patients with psychiatric comorbidity: results from the 2004 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

BACKGROUND: Few emergency department (ED) studies have examined how psychiatric comorbidity relates to hospitalisation decisions. METHODS: We assessed the relationship of psychiatric comorbidity to hospitalisation decisions among ED patients in the 2004 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. RESULTS: Patients with psychiatric comorbidity were five times more likely to be hospitalised than patients with a single psychiatric diagnosis. The most frequent psychiatric comorbidities involved substance use disorders (SUDs). CONCLUSIONS: Psychiatric disorders are underdiagnosed among ED patients. We believe that this underdiagnosis may be partly responsible for the high hospitalisation rates of ED patients with SUDs.

Adolescent↗

Concurrent validity study of the Slosson Intelligence Test-Revised in mental retardation testing.

The new Slosson Intelligence Test-Revised and the recommended abbreviated battery of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition were given to individuals whose Stanford-Binet IQs ranged from 36 to 110. The Slosson-R correlated highly with the Stanford-Binet, r = .92. However, except for the moderately retarded category, the Slosson-R unsatisfactorily matched the Stanford-Binet's assignment of individuals to IQ categories. In contrast, when all individuals were classified as either having or not having mental retardation, the match rate was much better. The Slosson-R can adequately screen for mental retardation, but its ability to accurately assign individuals to specific IQ categories appears to be limited.

Adolescent↗

Identification of low-effort patients through dynamometry.

In recent years researchers have devised a number of methods to detect patients who purposely exert low effort during grip evaluations. This study further defines the five-rung grip test introduced by Stokes and subsequently challenged by Niebuhr and Marion. New data are presented on the rapid exchange grip test. Data were collected on four groups of subjects (sincere normals, normals asked to feign weak grip, patients thought to be sincere, and patients suspected of low effort) using both tests. In calculating the standard deviation of the plotted line of the five-rung grip test, group membership (sincere or low effort) can be predicted. No statistical difference between peak scores on five-rung and rapid exchange grip tests in sincere subjects was found. A statistical difference between peak scores in the low-effort groups was shown. A model has been developed that can be used to categorize patients into low effort or sincere groups.

Adult↗

Sex and age difference in adolescents' value judgements of historically important events: theory, stereotypes and data.

The extent to which younger and older adolescents differed in their value judgments of historically important events was examined. Subjects were asked to list the ten most important events that happened in or to the U.S. since 1990. The subjects' choices were analyzed as a function of sex, age, political and religious orientation, and family size. In addition, 100 undergraduates were asked to serve as judges and predict which categories would be cited more frequently by males and which by females. Results indicated that the judges' predictions did not match the data. Age was a much better predictor of value judgments than sex. Further, several additional differences in value judgments were revealed that would have been missed had only the variables of sex and age been included in the analyses.

Adolescent↗

Figural factors and the development of pictorial inferences.

The role of figural characteristics in the development of pictorial inferences was examined. Two versions of 10 three-picture story sequences were presented to kindergarten and third-grade children. One version maximized while the other minimized figural similarity among pictures. After viewing the sequences, the children were asked to discriminate old study pictures and inferentially consistent new pictures from distractors. While the kindergarteners identified significantly fewer inference pictures than the third graders in all conditions, there was less difference between the grades in the figurally similar conditions. Overall, the kindergarteners identified the fewest inference pictures in the presence of distractors that figurally matched the study pictures. These results indicate that although the pictorial inferences drawn by kindergarteners are heavily influenced by figural representations, such figural dependency cannot account for all of the observed developmental differences.

Child↗

Patterns of recall in schizophrenics and normal subjects.

In two experiments it was demonstrated that the patterns of recall exhibited by schizophrenics qualitatively changed as the amount of structure present in the encoding and retrieval environments changed. When the encoding environment was structured and the retrieval environment was left unstructured (experiment 1), the schizophrenics' recall was not only lower than that of the normal subjects, but the patterns of recall of the two groups qualitatively differed. When encoding and retrieval environments were both structured (experiment 2), the patterns of recall exhibited by both groups were identical, although the schizophrenics continued to exhibit a recall deficit. This pattern of performance is more consistent with the notion that the recall deficit is caused by disease-induced depression of attentional capacity rather than by irreversible defects in ability to process information.

Adult↗

Integration of visual and verbal information in children's memories.

The extent to which children's visual memories were modified by subsequent verbal information was examined. In 2 experiments, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and college students were asked questions after being shown slides. Some questions described events that appeared in the slides and other questions described events not depicted. In experiment 1 correct recall of the visual events was facilitated by congruent verbal information and impaired by incongruent verbal information. When subjects demonstrated good memory for the original visual events, the effects of the verbal information increased with age. In experiment 2, the effects of verbal information on visual recognition performance were evaluated. Correct recognition of study slides and false recognition of distractor slides increased when the questions presented information depicted in the appropriate slides. Again, the influence of verbal information increased with age only when subjects demonstrated correct recognition of control slides. These results illustrate the increasing interdependence of the verbal and visual systems with age.

Age Factors↗

The distinction between perceiving and memorizing in the presence of category cues.

The study proposed and tested 2 hypotheses to account for the claim by Appel, Cooper, Knight, McCarrell, Yussen, and Flavell (1972) that "memorizing and perceiving are functionally undifferentiated for the young child" by presenting preschool, second-, and fifth-grade children a "memory" and a "look" problem under several treatments in which semantic category cues were present. Surprisingly, preschoolers showed functional differentiation even in the absence of semantic cues--a finding interpreted as evidence for a functional differentiation in the young child's deployment of attention. Second and fifth graders also exhibited functional differentiation in the absence of semantic cues, and there were age changes in the facilitating effects of input and retrieval cues on children's memory.

Age Factors↗