Can the Family Assessment Device (FAD) Be Used with School Aged Children?

This article examines the usefulness of the Family Assessment Device(FAD) in assessing family functioning with school-aged children (under 12 years of age) compared to children 12 and older and mothers. FAD reports from 194 children with asthma (132 under 12 years; 62 12 years and older) were evaluated in comparison to mothers' FAD reports as well as mothers' reports on two other family functioning measures: the Family Inventory of Life Events (FILE) and the Impact on Family (IOF) scale, both relevant to functioning in families with children with asthma. Although FAD scale reliabilities were lowest in younger children (alpha = 48-.79), good concurrent validity was found with mothers' reports on the three different measures of family functioning. Older childrens' FAD scales showed good reliability (> .70) but poorer agreement with the various maternal measures. With modifications to make items more structured and simplified, the FAD could be tried with younger children, although documentation of improved reliability is needed before more widespread use with school-aged children is advocated. The measure already shows good agreement with maternal report in this younger age group, which likely would be strengthened with improved reliability. FAD reports in older children correlated less well with maternal measures, but may represent nonredundant information on family health from an independent perspective and are worth considering in addition to mothers' perspectives.     

Working and long-term memory deficits in schizophrenia: is there a common prefrontal mechanism?

This study tested the hypothesis that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deficits contribute to both working memory and long-term memory disturbances in schizophrenia. It also examined whether such deficits were more severe for verbal than nonverbal stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical activation during performance of verbal and nonverbal versions of a working memory task and both encoding and recognition tasks in 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 48 healthy controls. Performance of both working memory and long-term memory tasks revealed disturbed dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation in schizophrenia, although medial temporal deficits were also present. Some evidence was found for more severe cognitive and functional deficits with verbal than nonverbal stimuli, although these results were mixed.     

An examination of the response styles theory of depression in third- and seventh-grade children: a short-term longitudinal study

The goal of this study was to test the response styles theory of depression in a sample of 3rd- and 7th-grade children. In addition, we examined whether the relationship between rumination and increases in depressive symptoms is mediated by hopelessness and low self-esteem. The procedure involved an initial assessment in which depressive symptoms, response styles, hopelessness, and self-esteem were assessed. The procedure also involved a follow-up assessment, 6 weeks later, in which depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and self-esteem were reassessed. Children with a ruminative response style exhibited increases in depressive symptoms over the 6-week period. In addition, the relationship between rumination and increases in depressive symptoms was mediated by both hopelessness and low self-esteem. Last, contrary to our hypotheses, neither distraction nor problem-solving response styles predicted decreases in depressive symptoms over the course of the study.     

Hotep's Story: Exploring the Wounds of Health Vulnerability in the US

A wide variety of forms of domination hasresulted in a highly heterogeneous health riskcategory, ``the vulnerable.' The study of healthinequities sheds light on forces thatgenerate, sustain, and alter vulnerabilities toillness, injury, suffering and death. Thispaper analyzes the case of a high-risk teenfrom a Boston ghetto that illuminatesintersections between ``race' and class in theconstruction of vulnerability in the US.Exploration of his ``wounds' helps specify howlarge-scale social and cultural forces becomeembodied as individual experience of disparatehealth risk. The case demonstrates that healthinequities would not occur if resources –employment, income, wealth, education, housing,profiling in the legal system, and health care– were more justly managed in keeping withstandards outlined in the Universal Declarationof Human Rights. Professional responses to the``wounds of vulnerability' may reveal importantaspects of who we are and what our work asscholars, practitioners, and advocates mustbecome.     

Parenting among Hispanic and Anglo-American mothers with young children

The authors examined parenting practices and developmental expectations among 38 Hispanic and 38 Anglo-American mothers living in the United States. Mothers of children 3 to 5 years of age completed the Parent Behavior Checklist (R. A. Fox, 1994), a 100-item measure of parents' developmental expectations, discipline, and nurturing practices. In addition, the authors appraised the Hispanic mothers' acculturation and selected them for participation if their scores on an acculturation scale indicated (a) that their lifestyle was predominantly Hispanic and (b) that they had not been assimilated into the dominant culture. The 2 ethnic groups were also divided by socioeconomic status (SES). There were significant main effects for ethnicity and SES on the discipline and nurturing scores but not on the expectations scores. The Hispanic and higher SES mothers reported higher discipline and lower nurturing scores than did the Anglo-American and lower SES mothers. An unexpected finding was the tendency for higher SES Hispanic mothers to report more frequent use of discipline than the other 3 groups.     

Facial Expressions of Emotion: Are Angry Faces Detected More Efficiently?

The rapid detection of facial expressions of anger or threat has obvious adaptive value. In this study, we examined the efficiency of facial processing by means of a visual search task. Participants searched displays of schematic faces and were required to determine whether the faces displayed were all the same or whether one was different. Four main results were found: (1) When displays contained the same faces, people were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face when the faces displayed angry (or sad/angry) rather than happy expressions. (2) When displays contained a discrepant face people were faster in detecting this when the discrepant face displayed an angry rather than a happy expression. (3) Neither of these patterns for same and different displays was apparent when face displays were inverted, or when just the mouth was presented in isolation. (4) The search slopes for angry targets were significantly lower than for happy targets. These results suggest that detection of angry facial expressions is fast and efficient, although does not "pop-out" in the traditional sense.     

Vagus nerve stimulation: a new form of therapeutic brain stimulation

Although the vagus nerve has traditionally been considered to perform efferent functions, in reality it performs significant afferent functions as well, carrying information from the body, head, and neck to the brain. Preliminary studies examining this afferent activity led to the theory that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) could successfully control seizure activity in persons who are refractory to antiepileptic medications. Unlike other forms of brain stimulation, VNS is unable to directly stimulate multiple discrete areas of the brain; however, through several pathways, it is able to relay sensory information to higher brain regions. An implantable VNS device known as the VNSTM NeuroCybernetic Prosthesis (NCP) System has been used in approximately 9,000 epilepsy patients in Europe and the United States since 1994. The implant has reduced seizure frequency by an average of 25% to 30%, with minimal side effects. Studies underway are also showing some degree of success in the management of treatment-refractory depression. The future efficacy of the implantable system in other disorders may depend on whether the implant can be more precisely focused to affect different brain regions. Research in this area is underway.     

Mean response times, variability, and skew in the responding of ADHD children: a response time distributional approach

Response time (RT) distributions from three fixed foreperiod conditions (2, 4, and 8 s) in a warned four-choice RT task were obtained for a group of boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD; n = 17) and for two groups of normal control boys (age-matched, n = 18, and younger-aged, n = 10). Quantitative measures of distributional shape were derived by fitting the ex-Gaussian distributional model to the individual RT data. Statistical results indicate that the ADHD distributions differ from the age-matched control distributions with respect to the size of the tail (larger for the ADHD boys), but differ from the younger control distributions with respect to the location of the leading edge (slower for the younger control boys). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) results reveal that the ex-Gaussian exponential component is highly diagnostic of the ADHD boys.     

The role of inhibition in the regulation of sequential action

We investigated the regulation of sequential action using a new paradigm. Participants learned a sequence of seven stimulus categories and then monitored for them during successive displays. All displays were instances of these categories, presented in pseudorandom order. On each trial, participants monitored for an instance of Category 1, pressed a key on a computer keyboard, then monitored for an instance of Category 2, pressed a key on the keyboard, and so on for all seven categories. Thus, a perfect trial contained exactly seven responses. Intrusion errors were classified as a function of ordinal distance from the current serial position ( n ). Fewer intrusion errors were made at near serial positions than at far ones, suggesting a gradient of lateral inhibition. In addition, more intrusions were made on n + 1 categories than n − 1 categories, suggesting greater availability of intended than completed goals. In accord with current models of sequential action, the results indicate lateral and self-inhibition as important mechanisms in regulation of sequential action.