American Indian Youth: Who Southwestern Urban and Reservation Youth Turn to for Help with Mental Health or Addictions

We illustrate the addictions and mental health service use of American Indian adolescents. Interviews concerning mental health need and service configurations with 401 Southwestern American Indian (AI) youth used questions from the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) and the Service Assessment for Children and Adolescents (SACA). Seventy-nine percent had mental health or addiction problems, with half meeting criteria for at least one diagnosis. One in 4 youth met criteria for drug dependence'abuse or conduct disorder, 1 in 5 for depression, and 1 in 8 for alcohol dependence'abuse. Most youth were helped by a combination of providers. Youth meeting more diagnostic criteria were increasingly likely to use service configurations with adults, nonspecialist professionals, and specialists, respectively. Regardless of disorder, youth were least likely to use configurations with traditional healers or specialists and there was little difference in rates of use between the two. The lack of services from specialist providers was potentially offset by use of an extensive range of informal adults, nonspecialist professionals, and peers. Since informal helpers, peers, and nonspecialist providers, but not specialists, are providing the bulk of services they must be given support and skills so they can function effectively.     

Patients with bipolar disorder show a selective deficit in the episodic simulation of future events

A substantial body of evidence suggests that autobiographical recollection and simulation of future happenings activate a shared neural network. Many of the neural regions implicated in this network are affected in patients with bipolar disorder (BD), showing altered metabolic functioning and/or structural volume abnormalities. Studies of autobiographical recall in BD reveal overgeneralization, where autobiographical memory comprises primarily factual or repeated information as opposed to details specific in time and in place and definitive of re-experiencing. To date, no study has examined whether these deficits extend to future event simulation. We examined the ability of patients with BD and controls to imagine positive, negative and neutral future events using a modified version of the Autobiographical Interview (Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 2002) that allowed for separation of episodic and non-episodic details. Patients were selectively impaired in imagining future positive, negative, and neutral episodic details; simulation of non-episodic details was equivalent across groups.     

Unraveling Cultural Threads: A Qualitative Study of Culture and Ethnic Identity Among Urban Southwestern American Indian Youth Parents and Elders

We utilized qualitative methods to explore ethnic and cultural identity among urban Southwestern American Indian youth, parents, and elders. Twenty-four respondents ranging in age from approximately 13 to 90 years were interviewed in focus groups divided by age. Six major themes and seventeen sub-themes related to tribal and pan-American Indian ethnic identity were identified. Two important findings emerging from our study were that common ethnic identity constructs can be validated and new identity constructs discovered through qualitative methods. These and other findings suggest the importance of qualitative methods in better understanding cultural and ethnic identity. Of particular significance was the notion that the most salient and relevant identity constructs can be learned from the voices and perspectives of ethnic identity members themselves across generations, age, tribal groups, gender, and reservation and urban residence.     

Suicidal behavior in urban American Indian adolescents: a comparison with reservation youth in a southwestern state

The majority of American Indians live off of reservations, yet research on suicidal behavior in this population overwhelmingly focuses on reservation Indians. This exploratory study interviewed a stratified random sample of 144 urban and 170 reservation American Indian adolescents to compare rates and correlates of suicidal behavior. One fifth of urban youth and one third of reservation youth reported lifetime suicidal ideation, although similar numbers (14%-18%) reported an attempt. Urban youth had fewer psychosocial problems, and in separate multivariate analyses, the groups shared no common correlate of attempted suicide. Different approaches to prevention and treatment may be warranted for urban Indian youth.     

Effects of aging on absolute identification of duration

Experiments to examine the effects of aging on the ability to identify temporal durations in an absolute identification task are reported. In Experiment 1, older adults were worse than younger adults in identifying a tone's position within a series of 6 tones of varied durations. In Experiment 2, participants were required to identify a tone's position in 9 tones of varied durations. Older adults' performance was again worse than that of younger adults; moreover, they showed a qualitatively different pattern of errors than younger adults. In Experiment 3, in which the tones varied in pitch, the performance of older adults was worse than that of younger adults, but the error patterns of the 2 groups were similar. The results suggest that older adults have distorted memory representations for durations but not for pitch.     

A timing-specific memory distortion effect in young children

It has been suggested that there are systematic distortions in children's memory for temporal durations, such that children's memory is not just less accurate than that of adults but qualitatively different. Experiment 1 replicated the memory distortion effect by demonstrating developmental change in the tendency to confuse a reference duration with one that is shorter rather than longer than it. When the long-term memory demands of the task were reduced by providing reminders of the reference duration on every trial, there were no such qualitative changes in error patterns (Experiment 2). Further evidence for developmental changes in memory distortion was found in the temporal generalization task of Experiment 3, in which stimuli were spaced logarithmically rather than linearly. In Experiment 4, a similar distortion pattern was absent in a task in which children made judgments about the pitch rather than the duration of stimuli, suggesting the effect may be specific to time estimation.     

Knowing when to hold ‘em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children,adolescents and adults

Regret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience regret in children and adolescents’ risky decision-making.     

The intersensory origins of word‐comprehension: an ecological–dynamic systems view

How do infants begin to understand spoken words? Recent research suggests that word comprehension develops from the early detection of intersensory relations between conventionally paired auditory speech patterns (words) and visible objects or actions. More importantly, in keeping with dynamic systems principles, the findings suggest that word comprehension develops from a dynamic and complementary relationship between the organism (the infant) and the environment (language addressed to the infant). In addition, parallel findings from speech and non‐speech studies of intersensory perception provide evidence for domain general processes in the development of word comprehension. These research findings contrast with the view that a lexical acquisition device with specific lexical principles and innate constraints is required for early word comprehension. Furthermore, they suggest that learning of word–object relations is not merely an associative process. The data support an alternative view of the developmental process that emphasizes the dynamic and reciprocal interactions between general intersensory perception, selective attention and learning in infants, and the specific characteristics of maternal communication.