Empirical evaluation of diagnostic rules for evaluation of Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery profiles of chronic schizophrenic, schizoaffective, and brain-damaged patients.

Various decision rules have been advanced for evaluation of brain dysfunction with the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery in a chronic schizophrenic or schizoaffective disorder psychotic population. The rules of Golden (1981a) produced the highest hit rate of 96% for identification of schizophrenics who had normal neurological examination findings as not brain damaged. Most of the psychotic profile decision rules, however, produced high false negative hit rates with known brain damaged cases. The critical level decision rules (Golden, Moses, Graber, & Berg, 1981) had the highest hit rate (76.7%) with the known brain-damaged sample. Optimal classification of diagnostic groups appeared to be facilitated by use of decision rules that were especially designed for the psychotic and brain-damaged groups, respectively.