AD/HD,Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience: A Survey of Recent Findings and Their Applications

Research findings and review articles in the neurosciences relevant to AD/HD are surveyed. Summaries of results in the areas of attention and executive control, learning, and neural plasticity and memory suggest that, as hypothesized, AD/HD is an apt field for the interdigitation of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Two case reports of adult AD/HD patients demonstrate the intricacy of the clinical picture.     

The Effects of the Structured Interview on Reducing Biases Against Pregnant Job Applicants

Some research has been conducted on the discrimination faced by pregnant women in the workplace. Few studies, however, have specifically investigated how this bias is manifested in employment or hiring decisions. The current study was designed to examine possible bias during structured interviews. Participants watched a videotaped scenario in which candidates were interviewed for a job. The 2 × 2 × 2 experimental conditions were varied to represent a structured or an unstructured interview, a pregnant or nonpregnant interviewee, and the open position of either a high school teacher or sales representative. Results indicate an overall bias against pregnant women and suggested that the structured interview reduces this bias.     

The role of repetitive thought in determining posttraumatic growth and distress following interpersonal trauma

Background and Objectives: Repetitive thought (RT) strategies have been linked to a range of negative outcomes following traumatic interpersonal events but are proposed to serve an adaptive function under particular circumstances. This study examined outcomes following RT within a transdiagnostic framework, and explored the potentially adaptive nature of trait-like and event-related RT. Design: The centrality of a traumatic event to one's identity was explored as a context under which the adaptive nature of RT might change. Young adults with interpersonal violence experiences (N = 163) reported use of trait-like and event-related RT, centrality of the event, depressive, anxious, and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), posttraumatic depreciation and posttraumatic growth. Methods: Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to examine main and moderating effects of four types of RT and event centrality on outcome variables. Results: Centrality positively predicted depressive symptoms and PTSS, depreciation, and growth. Brooding RT positively predicted all negative outcomes. Reflecting RT positively predicted anxious symptoms and PTSS and depreciation. Only deliberate RT positively predicted growth. Centrality did not moderate any examined relationships. Conclusions: Findings highlight the importance of addressing specific types of RT in interventions with survivors and of considering centrality as a robust contributor to outcomes following interpersonal violence.     

Higher body mass index is associated with episodic memory deficits in young adults

Obesity has become an international health crisis. There is accumulating evidence that excess bodyweight is associated with changes to the structure and function of the brain and with a number of cognitive deficits. In particular, research suggests that obesity is associated with hippocampal and frontal lobe dysfunction, which would be predicted to impact memory. However, evidence for such memory impairment is currently limited. We hypothesised that higher body mass index (BMI) would be associated with reduced performance on a test of episodic memory that assesses not only content, but also context and feature integration. A total of 50 participants aged 18–35 years, with BMIs ranging from 18 to 51, were tested on a novel what–where–when style episodic memory test: the “Treasure-Hunt Task”. This test requires recollection of object, location, and temporal order information within the same paradigm, as well as testing the ability to integrate these features into a single event recollection. Higher BMI was associated with significantly lower performance on the what–where–when (WWW) memory task and all individual elements: object identification, location memory, and temporal order memory. After controlling for age, sex, and years in education, the effect of BMI on the individual what, where, and when tasks remained, while the WWW dropped below significance. This finding of episodic memory deficits in obesity is of concern given the emerging evidence for a role for episodic cognition in appetite regulation.     

It's the way that you, er, say it: hesitations in speech affect language comprehension

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.     

Treatment of Missing Data: Beyond Ends and Means

The ethical decision making process behind the treatment of missing data has yet to be examined in the research literature in any discipline. The purpose of the current paper is to begin to discuss this decision-making process in view of a Foucauldian framework. The paper suggests how the ethical treatment of missing data should be considered from the adoption of this theoretical framework.     

Negative triangles: simple geometric shapes convey emotional valence

It has been suggested that downward pointing triangles convey negative valence, perhaps because they mimic an underlying primitive feature present in negative facial expressions (Larson, Aronoff, and Stearns, 2007). Here, we test this proposition using a flanker interference paradigm in which participants indicated the valence of a central face target, presented between two adjacent distracters. Experiment 1 showed that, compared with face flankers, downward pointing triangles had little influence on responses to face targets. However, in Experiment 2, when attentional competition was increased between target and flankers, downward pointing triangles slowed responses to positively valenced face targets, and speeded them to negatively valenced targets, consistent with valence-based flanker compatibility effects. These findings provide converging evidence that simple geometric shapes may convey emotional valence.     

Brain bases of morphological processing in Chinese‐English bilingual children

Can bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? To answer this question, we investigated the brain bases of morphological awareness, one of the key spoken language abilities for learning to read in English and Chinese. Bilingual Chinese‐English and monolingual English children (N = 22, ages 7–12) completed morphological tasks that best characterize each of their languages: compound morphology in Chinese (e.g. basket + ball = basketball) and derivational morphology in English (e.g. re + do = redo). In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left middle temporal region, suggesting that bilingual exposure to Chinese impacts the functionality of brain regions supporting semantic abilities. Similar to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal region [BA 45] in English than Chinese, suggesting that young bilinguals form language‐specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and cross‐linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.