Growth in emotional intelligence. Psychotherapy with a learning disabled girl

This paper describes the once-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a girl, called Ellie, aged eight at the start of her treatment. Ellie had a learning disability and displayed difficult behaviour at school and at home. In her therapy, Ellie grew in emotional intelligence, more in touch with and able to express her feelings. Her behaviour improved and so did her capacity to learn. In the therapy there were certain limitations to progress and this is discussed in terms of how Ellie's disability affected the basic achievements of emotional development, including a mind with a solid ‘reality ego’, able to contain anxiety, and able to maintain depressive functioning. The importance of parallel parent work, to share observations and understanding of the child's functioning is discussed. Difficulties for both child and parents in dealing with the pain of difference and how this limits emotional intelligence are discussed. The author hopes that this paper will encourage the offering of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to children and young people with learning disabilities, who are significantly more likely to suffer from mental health problems than their peers.     

Perceived stress and adjustment in religious Jewish families with a child who is disabled.

We investigated 82 religious Israeli families who had a disabled child, many of whom had experienced economic strains, lack of community support, feelings of stigma, and lack of time. Results showed that families reporting a stronger impact associated with the care of the disabled member were smaller, faced more daily strains and hardships, had a boy with a disability, and a mother who was older. About 50% were rated by a school professional as coping and adjusting effectively. Many mothers and fathers maintained close contact with their own parents, frequently discussed the child's problems, and sought advice from health care professionals and from their spiritual leader. Most families needed financial assistance. Many would have benefited from relief services, parent training programs, and a stronger social support network.     

Hyperactivity and related behavioral characteristics in a sample of learning disabled children.

64 learning disabled and 12 minimal brain-damaged children were evaluated by their teachers on 11 categories of behavior. Analysis showed that behavioral characteristics associated with hyperactivity did not differentiate among subjects. Teachers rated poor motor coordination as the outstanding trait of this sample.     

Reading deficits in learning disabled children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether LD children exhibited problems in the processes of attention, memory, or syntactical awareness when decoding written prose. Eighteen LD children and 18 normal controls were matched for initial word recognition skills. Subjects were then trained to read a list of individual words to criterion. Subsequently, they were tested on their ability to decode the same words in paragraph form, presented both immediately after training, and then again one week later. Half the children read paragraphs following standard English syntax, while the other half read a syntactically scrambled version of the same paragraph. The results indicated that a major contributing factor in the reading (decoding) difficulties demonstrated by the LD children derived from problems of acquisition and retrieval from long-term memory storage. The results were discussed in terms of their implications for the developmental lag theory of learning disabilities.     

Treatment of chronic food refusal in a young developmentally disabled child

Chronic food refusal is a common problem among young children with developmental disabilities. Children with chronic food refusal may require supplemental tube feedings or parental feedings. A multicomponent treatment package consisting of escape–avoidance extinction, shaping and positive reinforcement was effective in establishing a normal oral feeding pattern with a 1.5 years old developmentally disabled child who was fed by gastrostomic tube. Treatment effects generalized to the home setting and were maintained during follow‐up. After treatment, tube‐feeding was discontinued. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Configural learning without configural training.

Rats learned discriminations in which 2 familiar compound visual stimuli AB and CD were nonreinforced, whereas less-familiar compounds (EF, GH, IJ...) were reinforced (constant-negative paradigm). Such discriminations can in principle be acquired through elemental (nonconfigural) learning. Three different types of compound--object/object, object/position, and shape/fill-pattern--were used, and the number of familiar compounds extended to 3 or 4. In all cases, when rats were tested for the first time with previously unseen recombinations of the familiar elements--for example, AC, BD--they preferred these to the familiar compounds, implying that they had encoded configural information during the original training. Moreover, preference remained constant despite extended exposure to configural training in the test phase. The findings extend the evidence that configural representations are formed independently of explicit configural training.     

Effects of parent training on parent instruction and child learning of intellectual skills

The present investigation examined the effects of a brief parent training package on parental application of behavioral procedures during child instruction. In addition, it investigated the effects of parent training on child learning of two intellectual skills. Forty-nine parents and their $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$ to 5-year-old children participated. A discriminant analysis revealed that the parent training package produced variations in parental use of modeling, physical prompting, verbal instructional prompting, and aversive control. However, the pattern of variations differed across instructional tasks. Regression analysis showed that parent training produced differences in child learning in one of the two skills targeted for instruction.     

Visual feature integration in learning disabled children

This study examined the ability of 7 learning disabled children to detect and integrate visual features in a complex display. While the learning disabled children performed more poorly over-all than 6 control children, differences between the two groups were most pronounced when subjects were required to conjoin or integrate visual features to make a decision about the presence of a target item. This finding is discussed with reference to automatic and attention-demanding components of visual perception.     

Syntactic decoding times of learning disabled children

Syntactic decoding reaction times of 20 learning disabled children comprising two groups of subjects (mean age of 8 and 13 yr., respectively) were compared to the responses of normal controls matched for age and sex. An analysis of variance procedure showed that the learning disabled children and their normal peers did not differ significantly in responses to the experimental stimuli. This held true regardless of linguistic complexity, suggesting that delays in processing elementary syntactic constructions are not a concomitant of learning disabilities.     

Stability of WISC-R scores for a sample of learning disabled children

The study was designed to assess the stability of WISC-R profiles of 36 learning disabled children given the WISC-R two times. The mean time between tests was 2.5 yr. The pattern reported for learning disabled children on Bannatyne's categories was evident for the group at both times, however, this pattern was not found for the majority of subjects. Analysis indicated a decrease over time in Verbal IQs, Full Scale IQs, and Bannatyne's Conceptual category, confirming previous findings. Possible reasons for the changes in scores are discussed.     

Variations in WISC-R patterns of learning disabled children

The WISC-R was administered to 19 learning disabled students at the time of diagnosis and following a period of time in special program placements. Group analyses indicated fluctuations between testing times in the Verbal and Full-Scale IQs and the V-P IQ discrepancies. Small but significant differences in Verbal, Performance and V-P scatter indices were observed at one or both testings in comparison to the normal standardization sample. Although the suggested group pattern for learning disabled children based on the Bannatyne categories was confirmed on both occasions, there was considerable variation for individual subjects.     

Dynamic balance of learning disabled and nondisabled children

This investigation assessed a difference in the dynamic balance abilities of 30 learning disabled and 30 nondisabled children of elementary-school age. Only distance traveled across the beam, a novel task, was significantly different between groups; no other effects were significant. Nondisabled subjects traveled further across the beam before losing balance than learning disabled children.     

Vision and academic performance of learning disabled children

The purpose of this study was to assess difference in academic performance among myopic, hyperopic, and emmetropic children who were learning disabled. More specifically, myopic children were expected to perform better on mathematical and spatial tasks than would hyperopic ones and that hyperopic and emmetropic children would perform better on verbal measures than would myopic ones. For 439 learning disabled students visual anomalies were determined via a Generated Retinal Reflex Image Screening System. Test data were obtained from school files. Partial support for the hypothesis was obtained. Myopic learning disabled children outperformed hyperopic and emmetropic children on the Key Math test. Myopic children scored better than hyperopic children on the WRAT Reading subtest and on the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty Oral Reading Comprehension, Oral Rate, Flashword, and Spelling subtests, and on the Key Math Measurement and Total Scores. Severity of refractive error significantly affected the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised Full Scale, Performance Scale, Verbal Scale, and Digit Span scores but did not affect any academic test scores. Several other findings were also reported. Those with nonametropic problems scored higher than those without problems on the Key Math Time subtest. Implications supportive of the theories of Benbow and Benbow and Geschwind and Behan were stated.