nPsych Vocab Flashcards
Inability to perform transitive or intransitive gestures to command. Performance usually but not invariably improves with imitation and usually becomes normal when the actual object to use is provided.
Ideomotor apraxia.
NOTES: Left handed ideomotor apraxia may be seen with lesions of the corpus callosum. Conceptual apraxia and ideomotor apraxia may coexist, most often in the setting of Alzheimer disease.
Ideomotor apraxia is generally associated with left hemisphere lesions (inferior parietal lobule or supplementary motor area). Partial deficits, e.g., ideomotor apraxia in pantomime but preserved ability to discriminate correct from incorrect pantomimes, or vice versa, may be seen.
What condition manifests the following errors?
Body part as tool errors, in which the hand is used to form the tool being demonstrated, are particularly common (for example, persisting in using the fingers as the blades of scissors despite correction).
Errors of detail, for example imitating the twisting movement of the forearm necessary to use a screwdriver but not maintaining the handgrip on the axis of rotation, are also frequent.
Ideomotor Apraxia
What condition is assessed by asking the patient to pantomime the use of common objects (e.g., hammer, scissors, screwdriver, key) and symbolic gestures (e.g., saluting, making the thumb-out gesture of a hitchhiker).
Ideomotor Apraxia
This theory of aging postulates that some genes that are beneficial at earlier ages are harmful at later ages.
A gene that increases survival to reproductive age will be favored by natural selection if it decreases the chances of dying prior to age 20. Harmful late-acting genes can remain in a population if they have a beneficial effect early in life (e.g., increasing fitness or increasing reproductive success).
Antagonistic pleiotropy
NOTES: Natural selection will frequently maximize vigor in youth at the expense of vigor later on and thereby produce a declining vigor (aging) during adult life (Greek anti-, against + agonizesthai, to struggle, from agon, contest; ple(i)on, more + -trope, change).
The development of an adverse event resulting from negative expectations associated with expecting treatment failure.
Nocebo effect
The nocebo effect represents the negative side of a placebo effect and may not only occur in response to taking an inactive drug but also in the context of clinical trials (or clinical care) when placebos are not administered (Latin nocebo, I will harm; c.f., placebo, I will please).
An involuntary slow, regular writhing movement resulting from kernicterus, hypoxia, prematurity, and may also be present in many diseases of the basal ganglia.
Athetosis.
Distal limbs are usually more affected, although athetosis may be present in any muscle group. Willed movement of one hand may result in synkinesia, the contraction of distant muscles. Athetosis is commonly associated with intellectual disability, although relatively normal IQs may be seen if damage is restricted to the basal ganglia (Greek a-, without; from tithemai, to place myself).
A consonant trigram (e.g., d-w-l) is presented, and the task is to recall the three-letter sequence following distractor delays of differing lengths. Typically, the patient is instructed to count backward by 3’s, and distractor intervals of 9, 18, and 36 seconds are employed.
Auditory consonant trigrams.
Notes: This is a procedure rather than a formal test, however, and the above parameters can be modified to suit individual patient needs or the requirements of a particular experiment. Auditory consonant trigram testing has been demonstrated to be sensitive to certain types of frontal lobe impairment
What is the Brown-Peterson technique?
Essentially, the inclusion of a distraction trial or task to prevent rehearsal on memory tasks.
Notes: After hearing a trigram participants were asked to count backwards in threes or fours from a specified random number until they saw a red light appear (then they recalled the trigram). This is known as the brown peterson technique, and the purpose was to prevent rehearsal.
Generalized seizures that result in a sudden loss of motor tone. These spells typically occur without warning, and patients run the risk of head or other physical injury. Protective headgear is sometimes used by children and adults.
Atonic seizures/drop attacks
Notes: Atonic seizures tend to be resistant to anti-epilepsy drug therapy.
Method of assessment that emphasizes the qualitative aspects of how patients attempt to solve problems rather than relying solely on quantitative scores.
Boston process approach
This approach was popularized by Edith Kaplan that analyzes the process by which a specific score is achieved including an analysis of the errors that are generated during task performance
Boston process approach
Parkinsonism that develops as a result of ischemic cerebrovascular disease, and generally accounts for < 5% of cases classified of parkinsonian patients but figures of up to 30% of strokes may cause some parkinsonism.
Vascular parkinsonism (AKA arteriosclerotic parkinsonism, vascular pseudo-parkinsonism, and lower body parkinsonism)
Vascular parkinsonism differs from idiopathic PD by greater gait disorder (frequently freezing of gait), postural instability, and falls rather than with upper limb rest tremor or bradykinesia. Pyramidal sign findings and subcortical dementia are more common than in PD.
The therapeutic options for vascular parkinsonism are largely limited to levodopa, although poor or non-sustained response to levodopa is common.
A test of sustained and divided auditory attention in which a series of randomized numbers is presented. The task is to add each number to the digit immediately preceding it. For numbers “2-8-6-1-9,” for example, the correct responses beginning after number “8” are “10-14-7-10.” The digits are presented at four differing rates.
Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT)
Note: The PASAT has predictive ability for return to work following traumatic brain trauma. The PASAT is susceptible to practice effects, and is also negatively affected by increasing age, decreasing IQ, and low math ability/math anxiety
The tendency to walk backward involuntarily leading to postural instability and which is often seen in Parkinson’s disease and other extrapyramidal diseases.
Retropulsion
NOTE: Retropulsion is also observed when testing postural stability using the pull test, which is part of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), in which an examiner standing behind a patient gives sudden, brief backward pull to the patient’s shoulders to elicit possible retropulsion
A syndrome that affects an individuals’ phonological ability and orthographic memory. Deep agraphia is often the result of a lesion involving the left parietal region (supramarginal gyrus or insula). Individuals can neither remember how words look when spelled correctly, nor sound them out to determine spelling.
Deep agraphia
Additional Notes: A syndrome that is similar to phonological agraphia in that there is an impairment of the nonlexical spelling route so that nonwords and unfamiliar words are misspelled. There is also damage to the lexical spelling route, however, resulting in semantic errors in writing.
Spelling is strongly influenced by word class (content words are easier to spell than function words), frequency (high frequency words are easier to spell than low frequency words), and imagery/concreteness (high imagery words are easier to spell than low imagery words).
