Eur. J. Investig. Health Psychol. Educ., Volume 2, Issue 2 (August 2012) – 3 articles , Pages 41-76

Patients with mild dementia of Alzheimer’s type (DAT) use to present problems in decision making. Several studies have analyzed the cognitive functions in the process of decision making, especially in situations under ambiguity. One approach is the somatic marker hypothesis from the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Gambling Index (IG). One problem is the lack of specificity from IGT indicators, for this reason some hypotheses have been proposed in order to solve these deficiencies, i.e. the Prospective Valence Learning (PVL). In this study, we apply the IGT to 10 patients and 10 control subjects. We analyze the PVL parameter: loss aversion parameter (λ), shape parameter (α), recency parameter (A), consistency (c) and task development in function of advantageous choices. Our results show that control subjects’ performance is better than DAT´, nevertheless, in the first stages there are not differences, these appear in the two last blocks. Whit the PVL parameters we obtain differences in α and c, and, to a lesser extent, in λ. According to PVL parameters, DAT patients can be described as sensible at loss subjects who are more influenced by immediate choice and a very low level of consistence, what implies the use of random choice strategies. Full article

At the present time there are more than 100.000 people over 85 and this progression will continue in the future. At the same time there is a motion of cares the context of the expense provokes the scarce development of the social and domiciliary attention services. In this contexture the influence of those person who take care of the elder people, as much at home as during the episode of hospital admission, can be decisive in the loss of and cognitive capacity of the elder person. Our aim is to analyze the influence of various people who work as the main caregiver at home and during the hospital admission in the functional and cognitive of the elder person. To reach the investigation results that have been proposed in this work a “quasi” experimental design of repeated measures. Among the results, the influence of the people who act as the main caregivers worth an especial mention, during the elder hospitalization, watching that those people accompanied by their couples and children suffer a softer functional loss, meanwhile their hospitalization. This difference means a great reveal as it makes manifest through the computation of the size of the effect that give us a value for the “d” of Cohen of 0`984. We stand out the novelty of including the type of the main caregiver person at the hospital as one of the factors of back dependence at home and a change of residence after the hospitalization. Full article

The aim of present study is the construction and initial validation of a specific instrument to assess Quality of Life of older people in a residential setting. Firstly, an initial questionnaire was designed, the Cuestionario de Evaluación de Calidad de Vida en Contexto Residencial (CECAVIR; in English, Questionnaire of Assessment of Quality of Life in Residential Setting) and subsequently refined, reducing the number of items from 88 to 56. It was then administered to a sample of 50 institutionalized people over 70 years of age. The results obtained in the new version of the instrument showed a considerable improvement of the alpha coefficient, both in the total questionnaire (from .816 to .865), and in each subscale. The results also showed that Functional Capacity is the dimension that best explains (44%) quality of life in older institutionalized people. Thus, the CECAVIR is presented as a specific instrument for the assessment of Quality of Life, which takes into account its multidimensionality, obtaining optimal results in the initial analyses of reliability and validity, in older institutionalized population. Full article