Introduction to special series on college students with ADHD: psychosocial issues, comorbidity, and treatment

Increasing empirical attention has been focused on college students with ADHD in recent years. In this special series, five studies are included that address psychosocial issues, comorbidity, and treatment of college students with ADHD. The nature and results of each study are briefly described. This special series of articles significantly advances our knowledge of critical issues with respect to psychosocial functioning, alcohol/substance use, comorbidity, and treatment of ADHD in college students.     

Depression is associated with the escalation of adolescents' dysphoric behavior during interactions with parents

Though much is known about the stable mood patterns that characterize depressive disorder, less attention has been directed to identifying and understanding the temporal dynamics of emotions. In the present study, we examined how depression affects the trajectory of dysphoric and angry adolescent emotional behavior during adolescent-parent interactions. Adolescents (72 depressed; 69 nondepressed) engaged in video recorded positive and negative interactions with their parents. Depressed adolescents showed a linear increase in dysphoric behaviors throughout the negative interactions, while the incidence of these behaviors remained relatively stable across the interactions among nondepressed adolescents. A similar linear increase was not found in angry behavior. These findings show that depression in adolescence is associated with greater escalation of dysphoria during conflictual interactions between adolescents and their parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Competition effects of threatening faces in social anxiety

Threatening faces involuntarily grab attention in socially anxious individuals. It is unclear, however, whether attention capture is at the expense of concurrent visual processing. The current study examined the perceptual cost effects of viewing fear-relevant stimuli (threatening faces) relative to a concurrent change-detection task. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were used to separate the neural response to 2 fully overlapping types of stimuli flickering at different frequencies: Task-irrelevant facial expressions (angry, neutral, happy) were overlaid with a task-relevant Gabor patch stream, which required a response to rare phase reversals. Groups of 17 high and 17 low socially anxious observers were recruited through online prescreening of 849 students. A prominent competition effect of threatening faces was observed solely in elevated social anxiety: When an angry face, relative to a neutral or happy face, served as a distractor, heightened ssVEP amplitudes were seen at the tagging frequency of that facial expression. Simultaneously, the ssVEP evoked by the task-relevant Gabor grating was reliably diminished compared with conditions with neutral or happy distractor faces. Thus, threatening faces capture and hold low-level perceptual resources in viewers symptomatic for social anxiety at the cost of a concurrent primary task. It is important to note that this competition in lower tier visual cortex was maintained throughout the viewing period and was unaccompanied by competition effects on behavioral performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional inertia prospectively predicts the onset of depressive disorder in adolescence

Emotional inertia refers to the degree to which a person's current emotional state is predicted by their prior emotional state, reflecting how much it carries over from one moment to the next. Recently, in a cross-sectional study, we showed that high inertia is an important characteristic of the emotion dynamics observed in psychological maladjustment such as depression. In the present study, we examined whether emotional inertia prospectively predicts the onset of first-episode depression during adolescence. Emotional inertia was assessed in a sample of early adolescents (N = 165) based on second-to-second behavioral coding of videotaped naturalistic interactions with a parent. Greater inertia of both negative and positive emotional behaviors predicted the emergence of clinical depression 2.5 years later. The implications of these findings for the understanding of the etiology and early detection of depression are discussed.     

Emotion words shape emotion percepts

People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perceptual priming of emotional faces (e.g., a scowling face) was disrupted when the accessibility of a relevant emotion word (e.g., anger) was temporarily reduced, demonstrating that the exact same face was encoded differently when a word was accessible versus when it was not. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.     

Can a modified lineup procedure improve the usefulness of confidence?

In a face recognition, mini-lineup experiment we examined two aspects of the use of confidence about lineups. We modified the lineup procedure attempting to eliminate the difference in confidence–accuracy relationship between positive (old or identification) and negative (new or not present) decisions. In the modified procedure, participants: (1) selected the lineup member that best matched their memory of the target; (2) rated their confidence that the best match was indeed the target; and (3) indicated (yes/no) whether the best match was the target. Although the modified procedure produced higher accuracy than a standard simultaneous procedure, there was no evidence that it affected the confidence–accuracy relationship. Additionally, the modified procedure also allowed us to compare the extent to which confidence ratings versus binary recognition decisions better discriminated studied from unstudied faces. The results revealed a clear advantage for confidence, but indicated that binary responses were also a unique predictor.     

The Parentification Inventory: Development,Validation, and Cross-Validation

Abstract

This study hypothesized that subjects who strongly endorse unrealistic beliefs about intimate relationships would score higher on a measure of exposure to popular romantic media than subjects who do not. The relationship between exposure to media and satisfaction with one's current intimate relationship was also explored. Results for the 109 adult subjects support the hypothesis (r=.18, p<.05). There was also a trend for married women who were more exposed to the popular romantic media to be less satisfied with their current intimate relationships (r=? .26, p<.10). These results would seem to have significant psychological and social implications.     

Therapists' perspectives on home-based family therapy

Abstract

As a result of the passage of Public Law 96-272, home-based family services have proliferated throughout the United States, with family therapy playing a vital role. Voices of therapists providing these services have been absent from literature. Ten therapists participated in this study; each had experience providing home-based and clinic-based family therapy. A qualitative strategy was used to explore therapists' perspectives on factors regarding home-based family preservation services. Four themes emerged from semistructured interviews: the home environment, safety, context preference, and efficiency and effectiveness. Three recommendations are drawn from results and discussed.     

Adult children of workaholics: Self-concept,anxiety, depression,and locus of control

Abstract

Adult children of workaholics were compared with adult children of nonworkaholics on self-concept, anxiety, depression, and locus of control. Results indicated greater depression and external locus of control among the offspring of workaholics. Children of workaholic fathers not only had greater depression and external locus of control but also scored higher on anxiety. No significant differences were found between children of workaholic mothers and children of nonworkaholic mothers on any of the variables. Self-concept was not related to parental workaholism in any of the comparisons.     

Preference for online social interactions among young people: Direct and indirect effects of emotional intelligence

The social skills model of generalized problematic internet use predicts that individuals who perceive themselves as having low social competencies are at risk to develop a preference for online social interactions (POSI), which, in turn, might lead to compulsive use of Internet communication services. The present study aims to investigate if self-reported emotional intelligence (EI)—interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities—has an effect on POSI levels, and if this effect is mediated by the subjective importance attached to the major controllability (RC) and reduced non-verbal cues (RNVC) of computer mediated communication. 192 high schools and college students were recruited. Results from structural equation modeling show that Intrapersonal EI predicts both RC and RNVC, which, in turn, predicts the level of POSI. A partial mediation effect was found. On the other hand, Interpersonal EI is significantly associated with POSI, but this association cannot be explained by RC and RNVC. Its effect on POSI seems to be either direct or explained by variables not considered in the present study.