This study details the psychometric evaluation of the Quality of Life Inventory (QOLI), a measure of life satisfaction that may complement symptom-oriented measures of psychological functioning in evaluating the outcome of interventions aimed at ameliorating mental disorders, disabling physical illnesses, and community-wide social problems. Test-retest coefficients for the QOLI ranged from .80 to .91, and internal consistency coefficients ranged from .77 to .89 across 3 clinical and 3 nonclinical samples. QOLI item-total correlations were found to be adequate, and the QOLI had significantly positive correlations with 7 related measures of subjective well-being, including a peer rating and clinical interview measure. Significant negative correlations were obtained between the QOLI and measures of general psychopathology, anxiety, and depression. Clinical and nonclinical criterion groups differed significantly in mean QOLI scores. QOLI norms are presented, and the usefulness of the QOLI for assessing treatment outcome and for psychotherapy treatment planning is discussed.Many of the advances in clinical psychology stem from applications of experimental psychology to the clinical enterprise. For example, much of cognitive-behavioral therapy is predicated on applications from the learning, cognitive, social, and developmental branches of experimental psychology (Brewin, 1988;Masters, Burish, Hollon, & Rimm, 1987). It is surprising that clinical psychologists have largely ignored the voluminous experimental literature on quality of life, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being and its potential clinical applications (Diener, 1984;Schuessler& Fisher, 1985). This abundant literature, including the work of sociologists and social and personality psychologists, has obvious implications for assessing the outcome of psychotherapy, for defining "mental health" and positive adjustment, and for understanding numerous psychological disorders, including depression (Frisch, 1989).Authors from diverse traditions have argued for the development of non-pathology-oriented measures of subjective wellbeing to augment those that focus on negative affect and symptoms (

Selected clinical and laboratory factors allow risk stratification for postoperative pulmonary complications after noncardiothoracic surgery.

Determining the time of peak of cerebral maturation is vital for our understanding of when cerebral maturation ceases and the cerebral degeneration in healthy aging begins. We carefully mapped changes in fractional anisotropy (FA) of water diffusion for eleven major cerebral white matter tracts in a large group (831) of healthy human subjects aged 11-90. FA is a neuroimaging index of micro-structural white matter integrity, sensitive to age-related changes in cerebral myelin levels, measured using diffusion tensor imaging. The average FA values of cerebral white matter (WM) reached peak at the age 32±6 years. FA measurements for all but one major cortical white matter tract (cortico-spinal) reached peaks between 23 and 39 years of age. The maturation rates, prior to age-of-peak were significantly correlated (r=0.74; p=.01) with the rates of decline, past age-of-peak. Regional analysis of corpus callosum (CC) showed that thinly-myelinated, densely packed fibers in the genu, that connect pre-frontal areas, maturated later and showed higher decline in aging than the more thickly myelinated motor and sensory areas in the body and splenium of CC. Our findings can be summarized as: associative, cerebral WM tracts that reach their peak FA values later in life also show progressively higher age-related decline than earlier maturing motor and sensory tracts. These findings carry multiple and diverse implications for both theoretical studies of the neurobiology of maturation and aging and for the clinical studies of neuropsychiatric disorders.