Internal and External Validity of Sluggish Cognitive Tempo and ADHD Inattention Dimensions with Teacher Ratings of Nepali Children

The objective was to evaluate the validity of sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) and ADHD-inattention (IN) symptoms in children from Nepal. Teachers rated SCT, ADHD-IN, ADHD-hyperactivity/impulsivity (HI), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), anxiety, depression, academic impairment, social impairment, and peer rejection dimensions in 366 children (50 % girls) in first through sixth grades (M _age?=?9.35, SD _age?=?1.96) on two separate occasions separated by 4-weeks. Seven of the eight SCT symptoms and all nine ADHD-IN symptoms showed convergent validity (substantial loadings on their respective factors) and discriminant validity (higher loadings on their respective factor than the alternative factor) at both time-points. Across all three separate analyses (assessment 1, assessment 2, and from assessment 1 to assessment 2), higher SCT scores were associated with lower ADHD-HI scores and higher depression, academic impairment, and social impairment scores after controlling for ADHD-IN while higher ADHD-IN scores were associated with higher ADHD-HI, ODD, academic impairment, and peer rejection scores after controlling for SCT. Also, as hypothesized, SCT scores were not related to ODD scores after controlling for ADHD-IN. The study provides the first evidence for the internal and external validity of the SCT dimension relative to the ADHD-IN dimension with teacher ratings of children from Nepal, thereby increasing the validity of the SCT construct beyond North America, Western Europe, South America, and South Korea.     

Risk Factors Associated with Proactive and Reactive Aggression in a Child Psychiatric Inpatient Sample

Proactive and reactive aggression represent distinct functions of aggression that are associated with different risk factors, including individual and contextual characteristics. However, more research evaluating the interactive effects of risk factors is needed. The current study evaluated whether corporal punishment moderated the influence of neighborhood problems and anger coping on proactive and reactive aggression in a child psychiatric inpatient sample of 6 to 13 year olds (n?=?151). Findings were compared across child- and caregiver-reports of aggression. Consistent with expectations, anger coping was more strongly associated with reactive aggression than proactive aggression across informants. In contrast, perceived neighborhood problems were only associated with child-reports of proactive aggression, with corporal punishment moderating this association. Specifically, the association between neighborhood problems and proactive aggression was only evident at high levels of corporal punishment. Treatment implications and future directions are discussed.     

Self-perceived Authenticity is Contaminated by the Valence of One’s Behavior

Two studies tested whether people are biased to infer that their positive actions are more authentic than their negative actions. In Study 1, participants identified a positive or negative personal characteristic and assessed the authenticity of past behavior that reflected that characteristic. In Study 2, people imagined themselves performing positive and negative behaviors that they authentically did or did not want to perform. Both studies showed that people’s judgments of the authenticity of their behavior were contaminated by their perceptions of the valence of their behavior even when the objective authenticity of the behavior was controlled. Future research must disentangle authenticity and positivity to determine the degree to which each contributes to positive outcomes that have been attributed to authenticity.     

Spirituality as Struggle: Poetics,experience and the place of the spiritual in educational encounter

This paper begins to explore and interpret the unsatisfactory conditions surrounding the term spirituality. It finds in this unsatisfactoriness a set of contradictions producing a sense of struggle. Using poetry, narrative and experience, it locates spirituality in contexts of struggle. It argues that if spirituality can be interpreted in certain senses as struggle, spiritual education (or development) becomes education in and for struggle. This in turn suggests lessons for our future treatment of, and practical approach to, world religions and other forms of experience in the classroom.     

Deviations in the emergence of representations: a neuroconstructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders

A common way of studying developmental disorders is to adopt a static neuropsychological deficit approach, in which the brain is characterized in terms of a normal brain with some parts or ‘modules’ impaired. In this paper we outline a neuroconstructivist approach in which developmental disorders are viewed as alternative developmental trajectories in the emergence of representations within neural networks. As a concrete instantiation of the assumptions underlying this general approach, we present a number of simulations in an artificial neural network model. The representations that emerge under different architectural, input and developmental timing conditions are then analysed within a multi‐dimensional state space. We explore alternative developmental trajectories in these simulations, demonstrating how initial differences in the same parameter can lead to very different outcomes, and conversely how different starting states can sometimes result in similar end states (phenotypes). We conclude that the assumptions of the neuroconstructivist approach are likely to be more appropriate for analysing developmental deviations in complex dynamic neural networks, such as the human brain.