Friedman ( 3 ) developed an MMPI scale which successfully discriminated between groups of patients with focal lesions either in the parietal or in the frontal lobe. In an effort to extend the applicability of the Parieto -Frontal scale, William G ) enlarged his samples by including a group of patients with focal temporal lobe lesions in the validation of the Caudality (CA) scale which differentiated frontal from more posterior lesions at a significant level of predictive accuracy upon crossvalidation. Both investigators utilized MMPI data obtained before neurosurgical intervention from subjects with penetrating missile wounds, intracerebral neoplasms, and brain abscesses. These scales provide the only available personality measures which have some specific relevance for predicting lesion localization along the cephalo-caudal dimension of the cerebral cortex.
The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to assess the predictive accuracy of the CA scale for localizing electroencephalographic temporal lobe abnormalities among patients with psychomotor epilepsy prior to unilateral temporal lobectomy as a partial cross-validation on a posterior lesion group, and (b) to determine the effect of removal of the tissue generating the primary epileptogenic focus upon CA scale magnitude.