A New Way to Measure Emotional Functioning in Epilepsy
Abstract number :
2.268
Submission category :
Year :
2000
Submission ID :
3265
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/2/2000 12:00:00 AM
Published date :
Dec 1, 2000, 06:00 AM
Authors :
Linda D Nelson, Pany Tehrani, Linda Kaplan, Arthur C Grant, Univ of CA, Orange, CA; Univ of CA, Irvine, CA.
RATIONALE: To examine the effect of neurological and physical symptoms on emotional functioning in people with temporal lobe epilepsy. METHODS: Eighteen adults with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were administered a widely-used personality test, the MMPI-2. Tests were scored according to the standard procedure, then re-scored using a method developed by Gass (1992). This empirically-derived procedure removes all test items that measure physical or neurological symptoms. Results are then generated which pertain primarily to psychiatric or emotional functioning. By removing physical symptoms, a pure psychiatric test profile is produced. RESULTS: The results support surprisingly intact emotional functioning in this sample of adults with both medically refractory (n=7) and medically controlled (n=11) TLE. Application of the correction procedure to standard test scores resulted in a significant drop in scale scores. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with TLE who are administered tests designed to measure personality and emotional functioning may demonstrate spuriously high results if physical symptoms are not considered in scoring and interpretation.