ADHD in college students

OBJECTIVE: According to the American Psychiatric Association, 3% to 7% of the school-age population has ADHD and many children continue to display significant symptoms throughout adolescences and adulthood. Relative to the childhood literature, less is known about ADHD in adults, especially college students with ADHD. The principle purpose of this review articles is to summarize the major research findings concerning ADHD in the college student population with regard to prevalence of symptoms, neuropsychological and psychological functioning. Overall, findings suggest that college students with ADHD are at greater risk for academic and psychological difficulties, and they perform similar to non-ADHD controls on many neuropsychological tasks. These findings are preliminary, however, and are tempered by the small number of studies that have been conducted as well as the methodological limitations of these studies. CONCLUSION: Future research using larger sample sizes, rigorous assessment criteria, and a longitudinal design is needed to better understand the psychological, academic, and neuropsychological functioning of college students with ADHD. Studies are also needed to elucidate the effects of pharmacological and nonpharmacological effects of treatment on the functioning of college students with this disorder.     

The heart of the matter: a proposal for placing the self of the therapist at the center of family therapy research and training

As it faces the transition marked by the death or retirement of most of its first-generation founders, the field of family therapy finds itself still unable to answer the critical question of what it is that makes family therapy work. The two dominant approaches to answering this question, the common-factors perspective and the model-specific factors perspective, remain divided at this juncture by a fundamental difference of emphasis between the two. This article proposes a way of integrating the two perspectives via the hypothesis that therapists achieve maximum effectiveness by committing themselves to a family therapy model of proven efficacy whose underlying worldview closely matches their own personal worldview. The implications of this hypothesis for the training of family therapists are examined.     

Units of visual individuation in rhesus macaques: objects or unbound features?

Vision begins with the processing of unbound visual features, which must eventually be bound together into object representations. Such feature binding is required for coherent visual perception, and accordingly has received a considerable amount of study in several domains. Neurophysiological work, often in monkeys, has revealed the details of how and where feature binding occurs in the brain, but methodological limitations have not allowed this research to elucidate just how feature binding operates spontaneously in real-world situations. In contrast, behavioral work with human infants has demonstrated how we use simpler unbound features to individuate and identify objects over time and occlusion in many types of events, but this work has not typically been able to isolate the role of feature binding in such processing. Here we provide a method for assessing the spontaneity and fidelity of feature binding in non-human primates, as this process is utilized in real-world situations, including simple foraging behaviors. Using both looking-time and manual-search measures in a natural environment, we show that free-ranging rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) spontaneously bind features in order to individuate objects across time and occlusion in dynamic events. This pattern of results demonstrates that feature binding is used in subtle ways to guide ecologically relevant behavior in a non-human animal, spontaneously and reliably, in its natural environment.     

Minority students of color and the psychology graduate pipeline: disquieting and encouraging trends, 1989-2003

Trends since 1989 in the minority graduate pipeline in psychology are examined, with special focus on trends in recent years. Encouraging trends generally outweigh troubling ones at lower levels of the pipeline. However, in recent years disquieting trends dominate at the higher pipeline levels. Promising trends include a rise in the percentage (to nearly 25%) of minority psychology students receiving the bachelor's degree and a rise to more than 20% receiving the master's degree. Troubling trends include the stalling of growth in minority PhD degree receipt since 1999 and the lack of growth in the percentage of African American and Hispanic/Latino(a) students entering PhD departments. Given the mixed findings, one of the highest priorities for psychology must be continued and persistent efforts to develop practices and policies that enhance recruitment, high levels of achievement, and degree receipt for students of color.     

A meta-analytic study of self-help interventions for anxiety problems

The present study examined the effectiveness of self-help (SH) interventions for individuals with anxiety problems. Thirty-three studies, targeting a variety of anxiety disorders and problems, met criteria for inclusion with 1,582 clinical and subclinical participants. Self-help formats included books, audio/videotapes, and computer/Internet-based programs. The average effect sizes (Cohen's ds) comparing SH interventions to control groups for target symptoms were .62 at posttreatment and .51 at follow-up. When compared to therapist-directed interventions (TDIs), the average effect sizes (Cohen's ds) for target problems were -.42 at posttreatment and -.36 at follow-up. Format of SH materials, type of target disorder, presence of minimal therapist contact, and other study parameters were examined for their effect on treatment outcome. The results were discussed from the perspective of a stepped-care approach for anxiety problems.     

Response to Taguchi and Noma on "relationship between directionality and orientation in drawings by young children and adults

When assessing the relationship between direction and orientation in drawings by young children and adults, Taguchi and Noma used a fish-drawing task. However, the fish is not convenient enough as an object for such a task so it is highly preferable to use, instead of a single object, a set of several objects to assess directionality quantitatively. These authors' conclusions do not acknowledge alternative explanations.