Clinical accounts of Alzheimer's disease (AD) suggest that some patients exhibit markedly diminished curiosity and initiative early in the course of their illness. Such behavioral changes are extremely difficult to measure experimentally. We studied one aspect of curiosity by measuring exploratory eye movements in response to provocative visual stimuli in 12 patients with probable AD and 10 matched controls. Subjects viewed slides, each of which contained an incongruous or irregular figure paired with a congruous or regular one. Unlike controls, who spent significantly more time viewing the incongruous stimuli, AD patients distributed their viewing time equally and spent significantly less time than controls looking at the novel stimuli. Additionally, when presented with picture slides containing an unexpected element, AD patients exhibited diminished visual exploration overall and decreased attention to the incongruous part. Further analyses suggest that the results cannot be adequately explained by a general decline in cognition or by problems with ocular motility or directing visual attention. We conclude that AD patients exhibit diminished curiosity which can be measured by the study of exploratory eye movements.

The goals of the Stony Brook High-Risk Project are to identify precursor patterns, environmental stressors, and protective factors that are differentially predictive of psychopathology. In phase I we assessed 219 families and 544 children aged 7-15, including 31 families and 80 children with a schizophrenic parent, 70 families and 154 children with a unipolar depressed parent, 58 families and 134 children with a bipolar parent, and 60 normal control families with 176 children. A 3-year followup was conducted on 84 percent of the sample, and an additional followup is underway. Our data include measures of: (1) psychological functioning of the parents; (2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, and parenting practices; (3) child adjustment, including peer, or teacher, parent, and self-ratings; (4) early signs or precursors to the development of schizophrenia or affective disorder, including cognitive slippage, attentional deficits, hedonic capacity, depressogenic attributional styles, and subsyndromal affective patterns. Considerable deviance in family functioning, expressed in conflict, marital discord, and parenting skills, was characteristic of the families with an ill parent, and this discord was related to child adjustment. Children with a schizophrenic parent showed multiple and extensive cognitive, attentional, and social impairments, and at the 18+ followup, 22.8 percent of them compared with 9.6 percent of the normal controls were assigned a DSM-III diagnosis.

The utility of the revised 56-item Child's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI), an instrument less cumbersome than the 260-item original, was examined. Study I found the instrument to be highly reliable a t 1-week and 5-week retest intervals. Study I1 found the factor structure of the revision similar to that of the original, with Factor I11 somewhat less stable than the other two factors. I t was concluded that, in general, the 56-item CRPBI appeared to stand up well &s a research instrument.

No abstract

An association between children's school behavior and two family variables, marital discord and parental psychopathology, has been consistently reported in the literature. However, the joint effects of each of these two familial factors has not been closely examined. The present report provides a further examination of the interrelationships among these three variables with particular emphasis on the effects of marital discord on children's school behavior in families with behaviorally disturbed parents. Marital discord was found to account for much of the association between having a parent with bipolar disorder or unipolar depression and problematic school behavior, but the same variable did not explain the relationship between having a schizophrenic parent and problems in school. The implications of these findings for interventions with the children of disturbed parents and for high-risk research are discussed.

Levels of marital satisfaction reported by spouses of schizophrenic and affectively disordered patients were examined, and several hypotheses based on an attribution model of symptom controllability were tested. This model holds that patients' florid symptoms and marked behavioral excesses are more likely to be perceived by their spouses as illness-caused and, consequently, will be associated with less marital discord than negative symptoms or symptoms that involve behavioral deficits. Consistent with this model, the classification of patients on the basis of their predominant symptom profiles revealed significant differences in the marital satisfaction ratings of their spouses. Spouses of patients with negative symptoms and impulse-control deficits reported significantly lower levels of marital satisfaction than spouses of patients with positive symptoms. The results suggest that the symptoms that are most salient to clinicians and diagnosticians may not be the symptoms that are most salient to the families of the mentally ill.Living with a psychiatrically disturbed individual often imposes considerable strain on the emotional, physical, and financial resources of close family members (Creer & Wing, 1974;Gibbons, Horn, Powell, & Gibbons, 1984). Marital relationships are particularly vulnerable; although well-controlled studies are few, there have been consistent reports of relatively poor levels of adjustment in the marriages of psychiatrically ill

Cognitive and attentional deficits were assessed in children with either a schizophrenic, and affectively disordered or a normal parent. The children were grouped both by their parents' DSM-II diagnoses (broadly defined group of schizophrenics and heterogeneous group of depressives)and by a new set of diagnoses (narrowly defined group of schizophrenics, unipolar depressive group and bipolar group). Children whose parents met the more stringent criteria for schizophrenia performed somewhat more deviantly than children whose parents met only DSM-II criteria. In addition, the importance of splitting the heterogeneous depressive group into more homogeneous subgroups is indicated by the findings that children of unipolar parents generally could not be distinguished from children whose parents are schizophrenic. On the other hand, children of bipolar parents performed reliably better than children of schizophrenics. These findings are viewed within the context of current high-risk studies and psychological deficit literature and suggest that diagnostic issues require more attention by researchers in these areas.

Children of schizophrenics (n = 36), unipolars (« = 57), bipolars (« = 60), and normals (n = 65) were evaluated on a digit span measure of distractibility with the distraction and nondistraction conditions matched for discriminating power. Whereas there were no between-groups differences in performance in the nondistraction condition, children of schizophrenics and unipolars performed more poorly than children of normal parents in the distraction condition. Analyses of serial position curves revealed that children of schizophrenics performed more poorly on primacy as compared to recency portions of distraction trials. This finding differentiated children with a schizophrenic parent from children in each of the other groups. These results indicate that children of schizophrenics have a deficit in controlled information processing.