Many patients administered lithium carbonate complained of mental slowness. Lithium carbonate also appeared to have definite, yet subtle, negative effects on psychomotor speed. Studies reviewed also showed a trend toward impaired verbal memory. Recommendations with respect to future research, methodological and statistical problems, and additional clinical implications are presented.

Deficits in the ability to recognize emotions in others have been noted in a wide variety of disorders, ranging from the psychiatric to the neurologic. Emotions are vital to social interactions, yet there are currently few standardized neuropsychological measures in common use to assess emotion perception abilities. This study examined the effects of age on performance of the Comprehensive Affect Testing System, a new assessment battery designed to measure perception of emotion via facial affect, prosody, and semantic content. Age was not associated with a significant decline in performance on facial tasks, although there was a significant age effect when discrete emotions were examined. Age was strongly associated with a decline in performance on prosody and cross-modal tasks, and this decline was independent of the decline in fluid ability that also accompanies the aging process. The results underscore the need for standardized instruments to assess emotion recognition abilities.

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The study compared 5 patients with recently diagnosed Huntington's Disease with 8 patients whose onset was between 36 and 66 months prior to testing, 6 patients whose onset was greater than 72 months previous, and 7 control patients equated for age and education. The results showed evidence of focal damage in the early group on two scales of the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery: Memory and Visual. However, the results also suggested a general diffuse process, present in the early group in only very mild form, but more obvious in the middle and late groups. The findings were consistent with the hypothesis that the diffuse symptoms develop in a continuous rather than abrupt manner. The results also suggest that psychological testing may be useful in the early identification of Huntington's disease.

The current study evaluated the utility of the WMS-III Faces I subtest (Faces) for the assessment of malingering. Thirty nonlitigating traumatic brain injury patients and 30 control participants were administered Faces under standard administration and instructed malingering conditions. Although the two groups obtained similar scores when taking the test under standard instructions, both groups produced significantly lower performances when instructed to malinger, indicating that Faces is sensitive to malingering, but less sensitive to traumatic brain injury. The total raw score provided stronger classification accuracy than an empirically weighted combination of the five easiest items (i.e., floor effect items). A raw score cutoff of 31 yielded the maximum classification accuracy with 93.3% sensitivity and 80.0% specificity.