Browsing by Author "Crews, William David"

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    Cerebral asymmetry in facial affect perception of women: neuropsychological effects of depression
    Crews, William David (Virginia Tech, 1992-12-05)
    Forty right-handed women, half who had been classified as depressed, the other half nondepressed, participated in a tachistoscopic study of the influence of depression on the cerebral hemispheric processing of Ekman and Friesen’s (1976) happy, sad, and neutral emotional faces. A dynamometer was also used as a standardized measure of hemispheric motor functioning such as hand grip strength, perseveration, and fatigue. Results indicated that the depressed women were characterized by elevated levels of both depression and anxiety, suggestive of an agitated, depressive state with heightened arousal. Further, depressed as compared to nondepressed women displayed significantly faster reaction times to sad faces presented their right visual fields and happy faces presented their left visual fields. For the dynamometer data, primary findings indicated that depressed women displayed significantly less perseveration at the left hand as compared to nondepressed women. There was also a trend for depressed as opposed to nondepressed women to show less perseveration at the right hand. These findings from both the tachistoscope and dynamometer data are suggestive of differential arousal of both the left and right cerebral hemispheres and are discussed in light of arousal theory.
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    Neuropsychological test performances of young depressed outpatient women: an examination of executive functions
    Crews, William David (Virginia Tech, 1995-04-15)
    Thirty young, unmedicated, outpatient, depressed women were compared to an equal number of matching controls on a series of neuropsychological tests purported to be sensitive to the executive functions. Specifically, the measures included the Design Fluency Test, the WAIS-R Digit Span subtest, a Dynamometer task of hand grip strength, perseveration, and fatigue, the FAS Verbal Fluency Test, a Serial Sevens Test, the Stroop Color and Word Test, and the Trail Making Test, as well as a memory measure, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Despite past research which has indicated anterior hemispheric asymmetries and impaired neurocognitive performances in depressives, this research failed to identify any reliable differences between depressed and nondepressed women on any of the neuropsychological measures. These results argue against the frequently held stereotype that depressed individuals typically display impaired performances on neurocognitive tasks. Furthermore, since the profile of the depressed sample appeared to differ significantly from past studies, a discussion is provided as to how the characteristics of this group may have impacted the results. Implications of these findings for clinical practice and future research are also provided.