The Shipley-Hartford Retreat Scale as a measure of intellectual impairment for military prisoners.

Abstract

The MTOUSA * Disciplinary Training Center is the largest overseas installation for the confinement of American prisoners who were adjudged guilty, by a General Courts Martial, of violating one or more of the Articles of War. As part of the psychological evaluation of all prisoners at the institution, a routine testing program was instituted. 2 The testing battery included: 1. The Qualification Test as used in induction stations for literacy; 2. The Shipley-Hartford Test for intelligence and mental deterioration; 3. The Cornell Selectee Index for psychoneurosis; and 4. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory for the detection of serious personality disturbances, such as psychoneuroses and psychoses.Those men who, by failing the Qualification Test, were illiterates according to Army standards, were given the following individual tests:1. Army Individual Wechsler (seven sub-tests); and 2. Cornell Selectee Index (oral). Other tests given when necessary were: 1 Kent Emergency Test (intelligence); 2. Hunt-Minnesota Test for Organic Brain Damage; and 3. Visual Classification Test (Malingering Key). In addition, all Army test scores were taken from the WD AGO Form Number 20. Various test analyses, studies of inter-test relationships, and experimental investigations were carried out.The present report is limited to an evaluation of the Shipley-Hartford Retreat Scale as applied to the General Courts Martial prisoner. The scale, which consists of a vocabulary test and an abstract-thinking test, was incorporated into the group testing program because it conveniently offered four significant measures: vocabulary age, abstract-thinking age, mental age, and conceptual quotient (CQ). The mental age is based on a weighted total (vocabulary plus abstract-thinking) score. The CQ is presumed to be a measure of intellectual impairment or deterioration It is obtained by reference to a table of ratios between the abstractthinking and vocabulary scores, ". . based on the clinico-experimental observation that in mild degrees of mental deterioration, and in other

A comparison of the Wechsler-Bellevue and Shipley-Hartford Scales as measures of mental impairment.

“…Wright [10] reports that N. P. patients show impairment on this scale, but no check on validity is offered. More recently, Manson and Grayson [4] report a high incidence of impairment in army prisoners as measured by the Shipley-Hartford Scale and believe the vocabulary score is too high. They recommend using other test scores against which the abstraction score can be compared.…”

The validity of some current tests for organicity.

“…This difference of eight points proved to be not significant at the .05 level of confidence, which would suggest either that these brain-injured 5s were not experiencing a loss in conceptual thinking ability, or that this scale is actually not sensitive to such deficits. In view of the negative findings of previous experiments (1,6), the latter possibility is not unlikely.…”

Vocabulary and chronological age as predictors of “abstraction” on the shipley-hartford retreat scale

“…bL Thus, if the norms for eighteen-yearolds are used, the normal person of 50 will apparently have suffered a vast amount of deterioration." I t has been demonstrated that this in fact is the case with the SHY and that the existing norms cannot be used with older age groups (Garfield & Fey, 1948;Lewinson, 1963;Manson & Grayson, 1947). The purpose of this study was to establish the parameters of "normal" performance on the SH "abstraction" tasks in relation to chronological age and vocabulary level.…”