The cognitive failures questionnaire in psychiatry

As a self-report questionnaire, the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) was originally devised to measure perception, memory, and motor lapses in d aily life. CFQ scores have been found to correlate with some psychiatric sy mptoms associated with stress; hence, high scores on the CFQ are considered by some as an indicator of increased vulnerability to stress. Attempts to identify a stable factor structure for the CFQ have produced disparate resu lts. However, there is a measure of agreement with regard to the presence o f a "general cognitive" factor that includes loadings from most items and a ccounts for the lion's share of the variance. Not enough is known about the performance of the CFQ in clinical populations to use it as a measure of c hange. The current study sought to explore the performance of the CFQ in th ree groups of patients, organic (n = 209), mixed (n = 115), and functional (n = 322), and to identify correlations with measures of psychiatric morbid ity (General Health Questionnaire [GHQ]), depression (Beck Depression inven tory [BDI]), and recognition memory (Signal Detection Memory Test). In the organic and functional samples, the CFO score significantly correlated with the BDI and GHQ but not with the recognition memory measure. Three factors were found to be common to the organic and functional samples: cognitive, dissociation, and clumsiness. No characteristic pattern of CFQ item endorse ment to differentiate between the organic and functional samples was found. Seven items of the CFQ performed badly because of ceiling or floor effects . The "negative" results reported herein are of relevance to researchers wh o may be planning to use the CFQ in clinical research. The CFQ remains a pr omising instrument, particularly on account of its "ecological" features, b ut far more investigation is needed before it is used as a standard measure in clinical practice. Copyright (C) 1999 by W.B. Saunders Company.