The Cook and Medley Hostility (Ho) Scale has been found to predict the occurrence of coronary heart disease, as well as total mortality, and to be related to the severity of coronary artery disease. It has been proposed that the relationship between Ho scores and health status is mediated by an unhealthy psychosocial risk profile. The present study investigated the health habits of 202 young adults; it used a shortened version of TestWell, a self-report inventory of health behaviors. Subjects were classified as high or low scorers on the Ho scale and their overall TestWell scores and those of four subscales were compared. High scorers reported poorer health habits overall (p = .003) and on three of the four subscales (Physical Fitness, p = .04; Self-Care, p = .04; Drugs and Driving, p = .0001). These results suggest that the poor health habits of individuals with high hostility scores may be an additional explanation of the link between hostility and subsequent disease to the psychosocial risk profile explanation recently proposed.

In recent years, several short forms of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised have been developed to provide a more cost-effective means of estimating intellectual abilities. The present study examined the ability of four short forms to estimate intellectual functioning in a sample of medical center (61 male) and state hospital (69 female) patients referred for psychological/neuropsychological assessments. Although all four short forms obtained high correlations with Full Scale IQ, the seven-subtest short form (Ward, 1990) provided greater accuracy with respect to IQ estimation and intelligence classification based on Wechsler's (1981) schema.

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