Perseveration

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Related to perseverations: perseverative, preservation
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Perseveration

 

the persistent recurrence in a human being of a given mental image, action, or state. Perseveration can arise in the motor sphere, as in clonic or tonic perseveration; in the sensory sphere, as in certain eidetic phenomena; in the emotional sphere, in which case it is called perseveration of affect; and in the intellectual sphere. It arises in everyday life, for example, in the form of certain erroneous acts, slips of the pen, or slips of the tongue; it is especially common under conditions of fatigue or severe emotional strain, as well as in certain pathological states, for example, some mental diseases and certain types of localized lesions in the brain. Strictly speaking, perseveration, which is an essentially isolated and accidental phenomenon within the total context of a person’s mental life, should not be confused with what is referred to in psychiatry as an idée fixe, or obsessive thought.

REFERENCES

Zeigarnik, B. V. Vvedenie v patopsikhologiiu. Moscow, 1969.
Zimmer, O. Perseveration, Einstellung und Bereitschaft. Bonn, 1933.

A. A. PUZYREI

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
However, participants with TC < 155 mg/dL committed significantly fewer omission errors and perseverations than participants with TC [greater than or equal to] 155 mg/dL.
As expected, heavier caffeine users (with self-reported daily intakes of 3+ beverages/day) generally performed poorly (presumably due to overnight caffeine withdrawal) and committed significantly more commission errors and perseverations on the CPT-II.
Errors at this stage are anticipations, perseverations, and metatheses of dots, along with other contextual and noncontextual dot errors.
Finally, regression analyses were employed to examine the relations between baseline errors in the single target search, close errors in the difficult target search and perseverations in the alternating search on the one hand and other errors in each of the more difficult conditions.
Despite the different opinions about which properties the WCST scores indicate, researchers have reached a consensus that the first eight items except WCST3 measure perseveration (27).
All other responses were coded on a 20-point error scale that included the following error codes: no response; neologism; perseveration; unrelated word; circumlocution; semantic error; mixed error; phonemic error; correct in nontarget language; accent influence in target language (see Table 6 for descriptions and examples).
Of the total errors made (confusions, perseverations, omissions, and order alterations) in the three intervals, this study has taken into account omissions and perseverations.
Perseveration, which involves inappropriate repetition of a response, is frequently observed in patients with brain damage.
Nine scores were selected a priori for analysis: List A Trials 1-5 total, List A short delay free recall, List A long delay free recall, Learning Slope, Perseverations, Semantic cluster ratio, Discriminability, Proactive interference (List B adjusted for List A Trial 1), and Recognition versus long delay free recall.
Perseveration can be defined as any repetitive behavior, displayed by an individual in the verbal domain such as repetitive language or topic, or the gestural, or physical domains such as, physical action and object--related perseveration.
Occasional attentional lapses, perseveration, sequencing problems, and slight concreteness were seen throughout testing.