Effects of diurnal variation on the Test of Variables of Attention performance in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

The Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA) is a continuous performance test that assesses attention, impulsivity, and processing speed. Continuous performance tests are used in the assessment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adults. TOVA norms are based on a morning administration, and any TOVA administered after 1:00 p.m. is flagged as potentially invalid. Whereas the testing time recommendations make sense for pediatric samples, it is unclear whether they are appropriate for young adults, who typically show significant phase delay in their diurnal rhythms. The current study explores the impact of time of day on TOVA performance in young adults with ADHD. Participants were randomly assigned to either morning or afternoon administration. We found no significant diurnal variation in TOVA performance. We also found no interaction between diurnal preference and time of day of administration. Night owls endorsed more inattention symptoms on a self-report measure than more intermediate individuals but actually made significantly fewer omission (inattention) errors on the TOVA. Self-reported symptoms of inattention showed moderate, significant correlations with various TOVA performance indices. Self-reported symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsivity, however, showed no relationship to TOVA performance. These results suggest that the TOVA can be administered to adults with ADHD outside of the hours recommended in the manual without significantly compromising the interpretative validity of test score interpretation. Thus, a TOVA report that is consistent with ADHD should not be dismissed simply because it was administered in the late afternoon.     

The Pew Versus the Couch: Relationship Between Mental Health and Faith Communities and Lessons Learned from a VA/Clergy Partnership Project

The history of the relationship between religion and mental health is one of commonality, conflict, controversy, and distrust. An awareness of this complex relationship is essential to clinicians and clergy seeking to holistically meet the needs of people in our clinics, our churches, and our communities. Understanding this relationship may be particularly important in rural communities. This paper briefly discusses the history of this relationship and important areas of disagreement and contention. The paper moves beyond theory to present some current practical tensions identified in a brief case study of VA/Clergy partnerships in rural Arkansas. The paper concludes with a framework of three models for understanding how most faith communities perceive mental health and suggests opportunities to overcome the tensions between “the pew” and “the couch.”     

An initial study of transgender people's experiences of seeking and receiving counselling or psychotherapy in the UK

Background: There are no published empirical research studies exploring transgender people's experiences of seeking and receiving counselling or psychotherapy outside of gender identity clinics within the UK. As a result, counsellors know little about why transgender people seek counselling, who they seek counselling from, and what their experiences are of receiving counselling. Aim: To address this gap in the literature, this study investigated transgender people's experiences of seeking and receiving counselling or psychotherapy outside of gender identity clinics within the UK. Funding for this study was provided by a BACP Seedcorn grant. Method: A mixed method small‐scale qualitative research design was employed, comprising an online survey and five semi‐structured interviews. Findings: Participants tended to seek counselling on two or more occasions and received between 2 and 12 sessions. Participants sought counselling for common psychological concerns as well as gender identity and coming out issues. A fear of being discriminated against and exploring gender for the first time were significant barriers in seeking help. Participants reported mixed experiences of counselling but valued a therapeutic relationship in which they felt affirmed, listened to and understood. Discussion: The findings from this study mirror aspects of previous research conducted in the USA concerning transgender clients' experiences of counselling. However, these findings point to the importance of recognising the potential vulnerability transgender clients experience when seeking counselling and the need for therapists to develop greater awareness, knowledge and competence regarding working with transgender clients.     

Driving forces in free visual search: An ethology

Visual search typically involves sequences of eye movements under the constraints of a specific scene and specific goals. Visual search has been used as an experimental paradigm to study the interplay of scene salience and top-down goals, as well as various aspects of vision, attention, and memory, usually by introducing a secondary task or by controlling and manipulating the search environment. An ethology is a study of an animal in its natural environment, and here we examine the fixation patterns of the human animal searching a series of challenging illustrated scenes that are well-known in popular culture. The search was free of secondary tasks, probes, and other distractions. Our goal was to describe saccadic behavior, including patterns of fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and angular direction. In particular, we employed both new and established techniques for identifying top-down strategies, any influences of bottom-up image salience, and the midlevel attentional effects of saccadic momentum and inhibition of return. The visual search dynamics that we observed and quantified demonstrate that saccades are not independently generated and incorporate distinct influences from strategy, salience, and attention. Sequential dependencies consistent with inhibition of return also emerged from our analyses.     

Structural Effects of Poverty on Children

This paper evaluates the perceived benefit to a group of thirty caring professionals of a brief training in Child-centred play therapy. Play therapy enables a child to create fictional worlds and in this way make sense of the real world. By playing in the presence of the therapist, who provides a trusting relationship and at times shares the play, the child is able to obtain relief from the negative effects of distress, sadness, anger or shame. All course participants had adult counsellor qualifications and worked with vulnerable children (n= 25, age range = 56, mean years of experience = 10). The course was delivered in Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa via theory presentations; case presentations; practical skills demonstrations and instruction with tutor feedback and self-development awareness group teaching methods. Questionnaires provided qualitative data for consideration and analysis. Key findings included: pre-training prevalent feelings of inadequacy to meet the therapeutic needs of vulnerable children using adult style counselling; post-training perceived raised awareness of the therapeutic power of play with positive impact on professional and personal lives; perceived increase in therapeutic play skills and increased ease in establishing therapeutic rapport. Training was largely beneficial increasing the confidence, knowledge and skills of the course participants.     

The Startle Pattern in Infants in Response to Non-Auditory Stimuli

Abstract

Goldstein, K. Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940. Pp. 258 Reviewed by Frederick Wyatt. Reviewed by Frederick Wyatt

Katona, G. Organizing and Memorizing. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940. Pp. 318. Reviewed by Livingston Welch     

Young Freud's linkage with Persia

Abstract

Sigmund Freud's hands helped to mutilate a volume containing a series of “colored plates” like the one replicated in Figure 1 in the text. As a young adult, his personal library included a fairytale whose German text was entitled Die Träumleiter: Ein Marchen. No one has yet been able to authenticate the author's identity beyond the following imprint: “S. Andreas (1832).” The poetic play centers upon a celestial meeting featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dschami. It has been translated into English (The dream ladder: A fairy tale), but still awaits a psychoanalytically informed exegesis.     

Concreteness and word production

Two experiments are reported that investigated the effect of concreteness on the ability to generate words to fit sentence contexts. When participants attempted to retrieve words from dictionary definitions in Experiment 1, abstract words were associated with more omissions and more alternates than were concrete words. These findings are consistent with the view that the semantic–lexical weights in the word production system are weaker for abstract than for concrete words. We found no evidence that greater competition from semantic neighbors was an additional reason why abstract words were harder to produce. Participants also reported more positive tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) when attempting to produce abstract words from their definitions, consistent with more phonological retrieval problems for abstract than for concrete words. In Experiment 2, participants attempted to generate words to fit into a sentence that described a specific event. The difference between the numbers of abstract and concrete words recalled was significantly smaller in the event condition than in the definition condition, and evidence no longer emerged of greater phonological retrieval failure for abstract words. Overall, the results are consistent with the view that the semantic–lexical weights, but not the lexical–phonological weights, are weaker for abstract than for concrete words in the word production system.     

Mapping the Connections between Politics and Morality: The Multiple Sociopolitical Orientations Involved in Moral Intuition

According to moral foundations theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2004), five foundations are central to moral intuition. The two individualizing foundations—harm/care and fairness/reciprocity—hinge on the rights of the individual, whereas the three binding foundations—in‐group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity—focus on communal bonds. Recent work suggests that reliance on the various foundations varies as a function of sociopolitical orientation: liberals consistently rely on the individualizing foundations, whereas conservatives rely on both the individualizing and binding foundations. In an effort to further explore the relationship between sociopolitical orientation and morality, we argue that only certain types of sociopolitical attitudes and beliefs should relate to each cluster of foundations. Drawing on dual‐process models of social and political attitudes, we demonstrate that the individualizing foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for equality versus inequality (i.e., SDO and competitive‐jungle beliefs), whereas the binding foundations are aligned with attitudes and beliefs relevant to preferences for openness versus social conformity (i.e., RWA and dangerous‐world beliefs). We conclude by discussing the consequences of these findings for our understanding of the relationship between sociopolitical and moral orientations.