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Abstract:
Alcoholic Korsakoff (AK) patients are known to display
several cognitive impairments, but only few neuropsychological
studies concentrate on the affective changes as reduced spontaneous
affectively oriented behavior, little emotional responsiveness and
clinical impression of general apathy. In this study, the ability
to identify, recall and recognize emotional words was studied in 31
AK-patients and 30 matched nonalcoholic controls. All subjetcs were
tested with a neuropsychological test battery and the AWT
(Affektiver Wörtertest, Fujiwara et al.). The AWT is an
implicit verbal learning test consisting of neutral and emotional
words. In the learning trial subjects are asked to judge the
affective valence of 15 words. After a delay of 15 minutes, free
recall and recognition tasks are administered. Patients scored
significantly poorer than controls in all AWT measures. Similar to
controls, patients recalled emotional words better than neutral
words, but this difference was not significant. Especially
recognition of positive-affective words was severely deteriorated
by means of large numbers of false positives. All AK-patients had
deficits in identifying, recalling and recognizing emotionally
valenced words compared to controls. Furthermore the high number of
false positives could reflect a tendency to confabulation. In
neuropsychological assessment of affective and memory functions of
AK-patients the AWT is a sensitive measure.
Fujiwara, E., Brand, M., Fast, K., Markowitsch, H.J. Affektiver
Wörtertest. Göttingen: Hogrefe (in prep.)
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