BACKGROUND The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is widely used in population-based longitudinal studies to quantify cognitive change. However, its poor metrological properties, mainly ceiling/floor effects and varying sensitivity to change, have largely restricted its usefulness. We propose a normalizing transformation that corrects these properties, and makes possible the use of standard s...

OBJECTIVES In this article, we discuss the importance of studying the relationship between health and cognitive function, and some of the methods with which this relationship has been studied. METHODS We consider the challenges involved, in particular operationalization of the health construct and causal inference in the context of observational data. We contrast the approaches taken, and rev...

OBJECTIVE The primary goal of the current study was to investigate factors contributing to more negative cognitive change at older ages. METHOD Longitudinal data on 12 cognitive tests were examined in 2,637 adults ranging from 18 to 85 years of age. Because both the intervals between measurement occasions and the number of occasions varied across participants, it was possible to investigate e...

BACKGROUND Personality is suggested to be a major risk factor for depression but large-scale individual participant meta-analyses on this topic are lacking. METHOD Data from 10 prospective community cohort studies with 117,899 participants (mean age 49.0 years; 54.7% women) were pooled for individual participant meta-analysis to determine the association between personality traits of the five...

We examined, over 4 years, the interrelationships between changes in teachers’ ratings of student behavior and changes in students’ self-reports of their personality. Participants were Australian high school students in Grades 8–11 (Ns were 891, 763, 778, and 571, respectively). Teachers evaluated students’ behavioral problems and overall adjustment, whereas students reported on their levels of...

After Taiwan governments implement it’s egovernment portal (MyeGov, www.gov.tw) in 2002 as a means of delivering better information services and resources, building quality service that encourage citizen uptake is becoming an increasing challenge. This paper addresses this issue and examines the quality divide cause by the cognitive difference between users and administrators of the egovernment...

Although activity participation is promoted as cognitively protective, critical questions of causality remain. In a cohort followed every 5 years from age 75 to 85 years, potential reciprocal associations between level and change in leisure activity participation and level and change in cognitive abilities were examined. Participants in the Glostrup 1914 Cohort, a longitudinal study of aging, c...

OBJECTIVE Prior research has found that within-person standard deviations across different neuropsychological domains are larger in various clinical groups than in healthy control groups, but little is known about the specificity of these measures to clinical conditions. METHOD Within-person standard deviations were computed across composite scores representing episodic memory, perceptual spe...

We examined change and stability of the 3 personality types identified by Block and Block (1980) and studied their links with adjustment and relationships. We used data from a 5-wave study of 923 early-to-middle and 390 middle-to-late adolescents, thereby covering the ages of 12-20 years. In Study 1, systematic evidence for personality change was found, in that the number of overcontrollers and...

Discusses cognitive-behavioral play therapy (CBPT), a developmentally sensitive treatment for young children that relies on flexibility, decreased expectation for verbalizations by the child, and increased reliance on experiential approaches. The development of CBPT for preschool-age children provides a relatively unique adaptation of cognitive therapy as it was originally developed for adults....