Management of Behavioral Problems in Late Life—Therapeutic Approaches and Related Issues: Introduction to a Special Issue

In this introduction, I provide a brief overview of the five papers contained within this special issue of the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology. The purpose of this issue is to provide new information and insight into various therapeutic approaches and issues related to the assessment and treatment of behavioral problems in older adults. These papers cover both basic and applied issues pertaining to the broad topic of behavioral management in late adulthood, offering new insights and directions for future research.     

Electrophysiological evidence for the "missing link" in crossmodal attention.

Orienting attention involuntarily to the location of a sensory event influences responses to subsequent stimuli that appear in different modalities with one possible exception: orienting attention involuntarily to a sudden light sometimes fails to affect responses to subsequent sounds (e.g., Spence & Driver, 1997). Here we investigated the effects of involuntary attention to a brief flash on the processing of subsequent sounds in a design that eliminates stimulus-response compatibility effects and criterion shifts as confounding factors. In addition, the neural processes mediating crossmodal attention were studied by recording event-related brain potentials. Our data show that orienting attention to the location of a spatially nonpredictive visual cue modulates behavioural and neural responses to subsequent auditory targets when the stimulus onset asynchrony is short (between 100 and 300 ms). These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that involuntary shifts of attention are controlled by supramodal brain mechanisms rather than by modality-specific ones.     

EMPOWERING TOKEN WOMEN LEADERS

We hypothesized that, in a masculine task, only token women leaders who were empowered through position (by being appointed leader) and expertise (trained with task-relevant information) and legitimated by a male experimenter as credible would be more effective in influencing the performance of their all-male groups than appointed-only and appointed-trained leaders. Thirty women undergraduates each led a small group of male students on a moon survival task. The hypothesis was supported. Videotapes of group interactions revealed that appointed-trained leaders interrupted group members and used tentative tag questions in failed attempts to share their task-relevant knowledge. In addition, group members reported the most dissatisfaction with appointed-trained leaders who, without legitimacy, violated diffused gender roles by presuming to be expert on a masculine task. The importance of the organizational empowerment of token women is underscored.     

Spontaneous symbol acquisition and communicative use by pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus)

Two pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) have spontaneously begun to use symbols to communicate with people. In contrast to common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) using the same communicative system, the pygmy chimpanzees did not need explicit training in order to form referential symbol-object associations. Instead, they acquired symbols by observing others use these symbols in daily communications with them. In addition, the pygmy chimpanzees have begun to comprehend spoken English words and can readily identify lexigrams upon hearing the spoken words. By contrast, common chimpanzees who received similar exposure to spoken English are unable to do so. The older pygmy chimpanzee has begun to form requests of the form agent-verb-recipient in which he is neither the agent nor the recipient. By contrast, similarly aged common chimpanzees limited their requests to simple verbs, in which the agent was always presumed to be the addressee and the chimpanzee itself was always the recipient, thus they had no need to indicate a specific agent or recipient. These results suggest that these pygmy chimpanzees exhibit symbolic and auditory perceptual skills that are distinctly different from those of common chimpanzees.     

Clinical,developmental and social aspects of infant crying and colic

Persistent unexplained infant crying in the first few months is a common source of distress for parents and is costly for the health services. The aim was to assess the merits of developmental and social conceptualizations of this phenomenon, compared to the clinical approach as represented by the concept of colic. From a community sample of 530 infants, 67 who met the ‘rule of threes’ definition of colic by fussing and crying for 3 or more hours per day at 4-5 weeks of age were chosen. To avoid confusion, these infants were called ‘persistent criers’. Groups of ‘evening criers’ (N = 38) and ‘moderate cries’ (N = 55) were also selected. These 160 infants were assessed by researcher measures of their consolability and by maternal diary measures of their amounts of fussing, crying and colic behaviour when 5-6 weeks old. The persistent and evening criers cried more than the moderate criers. However, irritable, ‘fussy’ behaviour was the predominant form of distress for all three groups of infants. Colic bouts–defined as ‘bouts of intense, unsoothable crying and other behaviour, perhaps due to stomach or bowel pain’–were rare even among the persistent criers and only 7% of these infants were found to be inconsolable. The results support growing evidence that normal infant developmental processes are central to this phenomenon. In addition, social interactions between infants and parents, and parental subjective variables, appear to be involved. Colic was distinguished as a rare and separate form of distress by the infants' mothers. Further evidence needs to determine whether colic is a distinct clinical phenomenon or an extreme degree of normal distress interpreted within a western cultural framework.     

The effects of explicit timing and feedback on compositional response rate in elementary school children

The effects of several variables on compositional response rate were investigated in three classrooms. After establishing baseline composition rates in each of the three classrooms, an experimental phase was introduced that consisted of: explicit timing of the children's composition period with a stopwatch, immediate feedback on the number of words each child produced, public posting of the greatest number of words written by each child to date, and instructions to try to exceed their highest score. In the second-grade classroom, these conditions were introduced, removed, and re-introduced. In two fifth-grade classrooms, these conditions were introduced according to a multiple baseline, across classes. In all cases, introduction of the experimental conditions led to a doubling of rate of words written by students and an increase in subjective quality ratings of compositions made by independent judges.