Cognitive assessment is very crucial to know the degree of cognitive changes among psychiatric patients especially schizophrenics, but getting the appropriate instrument for assessing executive functions among these patients is not quite easy.
Handbook of Executive Functioning :
Sam Goldstein • Jack A. Naglieri, 2014
Excellent and I think it will be useful for you.
It contains a full chapter about EF assessment
I have the book if you need
There is no single test of executive function. Executive functions draw on an individual’s more fundamental or primary cognitive skills, such as attention, language and perception, to generate higher levels of creative and abstract thought. It is these executive functions that allow an individual to dynamically problem solve, and to self-monitor performance against sets of rules or changes in circumstances. They include abilities such as concept formation, inhibition, planning and cognitive flexibility. The Delis Kaplan Executive Function System attempts to cover this range of function, but needs to be adminstered alongside other measures of cognitive function in order to make sense of the results. In my head injury work, the total assessment time would be anywhere between 6 and 7 hours, as I would also be fully assessing verbal and non-verbal intelligence and memory, information processing speed and accuracy, perception, attention/concentration, and symptom validity/effort.
A series of position papers/recommendations has come out of the work of the CNTRICS group for task related to executive control, working memory, and episodic memory in schizophrenia that might be of use. These can be located on PubMed by simply searching for "CNTRICS".
Perviouly studies took the executive funtion to be a unitary concept, and, traditionally, WSCT test was designed to estimate one's exective functions, and it was a sensitive task to assess the impaired executive controls in patients with schizophrenia.
Recently, researches found that executive function was a complex concept, it includes abilities such as working memory updating, inhibition, and task switching.
WM deficit was also observed in patients with schizophrenia, and evidence of deficit in inhibition was also observed.
The real executive functions are the speech and the differented hand motoric.
Dear Esonwanne
Hayling Sentence Completion Test (HSCT) has been thoroughly evaluated in some studies to assess executive dysfunction in schizophrenia. HSCT was originally designed to assess executive function in patients with cerebral leisons. However HSCT has been used in several studies to assess executive function defects in schizophrenia, as evidence suggests that prefrontal cortex abnormalities in schizophrenia is associated with neurocognitive deficits. However HSCT is one of the validated instruments and may not be the most valuable one in schizophrenia.
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