Impaired planning and reasoning affect the individuals ability to realistically assess and manage the problems of everyday living. New problems and situations may be especially poorly handled because of the inability to transfer previous knowledge to the new event. An individual that has DES may have a short attention span due to impairment in attentional control. This may alter the individuals ability to focus, and as such have difficulty with reading and following a storyline or conversation. For instance, they can easily lose track of conversations which can make it difficult to hold a meaningful conversation and may result in avoiding social interactions.Individuals with DES will have very poor working memory and short term memory due to executive dysfunction. The dysfunction can range from mild and subtle to severe and obvious. There is a tremendous variability in the manifestations of executive dysfunction with strong influences often apparent from the affected persons personality, life experiences and intellect. Individuals with DES may experience confabulation, which is the spontaneous reporting of events that never happened. This can affect their autobiographical memory. It is thought that patients may not be able to assess the accuracy of memory retrieval and therefore elaborate on implausible memories.Individuals with dementia, delirium or other severe psychiatric illnesses combined with DES often have disturbed sleep patterns. Some will not recognize that it is night-time and may become upset when someone tries to correct them. Emotional symptoms
The emotional symptoms that individuals with DES experience may be quite extreme and can cause extensive problems.
Controversy
Some researchers have suggested that DES is mislabelled as a syndrome because it is possible for the symptoms to exist on their own. Also, there is not a distinct pattern of damage that leads to the syndrome. Not all patients with frontal lobe damage have DES and some patients with no damage at all to the frontal lobe exhibit the necessary pattern of symptoms. This has led research to investigate the possibility that executive functioning is broken down into multiple processes that are spread throughout the frontal lobe. Further disagreement comes from the syndrome being based on Baddeley and Hitchs model of working memory and the central executive, which is a hypothetical construct.The vagueness of some aspects of the syndrome has led researchers to test for it in a non-clinical sample. The results show that some dysexecutive behaviours are part of everyday life, and the symptoms exist to varying degrees in everyone. For example, absent-mindedness and lapses in attention are common everyday occurrences for most people. However, for the majority of the population such inattentiveness is manageable, whereas patients with DES experience it to such a degree that daily tasks become difficult. See also
ADHD
Schizophrenia


== References ==