Apathy: Why Care? The Relationship Between Apathy and Cognition in Young Adults and Individuals with Cerebrovascular Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Apathy is characterized by diminished goal-directed behaviour (e.g., lack of effort, initiative, and/or productivity), decreased goal-directed cognition (e.g., lack of interest in learning/pursuing new experiences), and blunted emotion (e.g., unchanging affect; Marin, 1991). Greater apathy is correlated with poorer social, physical, and functional outcomes (Kaufer et al., 1998; Starkstein, Federoff, Price, Leiguarda, & Robinson, 1993). Apathy may be present in both clinical and non-clinical populations, including individuals with stroke, dementia, depression, and healthy adults. Apathy is related to depression and is a common characteristic of dysexecutive syndromes. It may occur in conjunction with a variety of other clinical difficulties and comorbidities, complicating assessment and treatment (Marin, 1990). The purpose of the current dissertation was to advance our understanding of apathy, its relationship to depression, and its influence on cognition, in individuals with cerebrovascular disease and in young adults. This dissertation had three primary goals, which were addressed in five chapters. First, it explored how symptoms of apathy (i.e., decreases in goal-oriented behaviour, goal-oriented cognition, and/or emotional blunting) were related to cognition (i.e., memory and executive functioning) beyond the influence of depressive symptoms in individuals with cerebrovascular disease (Articles 1 and 2). Second, it examined the relative contribution of apathy and depression on cognition (particularly neutral and emotional memory) in young educated adults (N = 96), positing that apathy may impair overall cognitive performance to a greater degree than depression, but that depression may impact the type of emotional content that is remembered (Article 3). Last, it extended upon findings from Articles 1 and 2 by designing and implementing a randomized controlled trial (N = 72 stroke patients) to evaluate whether goal-setting could improve cognitive performance in the chronic phase after stroke (Article 4). These studies demonstrate the importance of a) screening for apathy (even in the absence of depressive symptoms), b) differentiating between apathy and depression, c) appreciating the relationship between apathy and cognition (e.g., executive function and memory) in young educated adults and in individuals with cerebrovascular disease, and d) demonstrating the utility of intervention tools (e.g., goal-setting) to enhance cognitive performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".