Individuelle Therapiezielerreichung nach Gruppentherapie „SAVE“

Background

Adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are severely impaired in routine daily activities in the same way as adults. Therapy programs focus on improving everyday behavior. Goal attainment scaling (GAS) has already proven to be a suitable instrument for assessing treatment success with adult ADHD patients.

Material and methods

Goal attainment scaling was used in addition to standardized self-evaluation of core symptoms of ADHD in 49 adolescents aged 12-18 years old with a mean age of 14.14 years (standard deviation SD±1.59 years) with ADHD to operationalize treatment success of the cognitive behavior group therapy program SAVE. Behavior-oriented aims and criteria for target achievement were set. To examine treatment success changes were assessed at different time points (10 weeks before treatment, process evaluation during treatment and after treatment).

Results

The adolescents in this study were able to define relevant goals together with the therapists. They focused on goals concerning organization of everyday life, attention, distraction and power of endurance. Goals were reached from the beginning of the study to post-evaluation, even before SAVE started, with great effects (d?=?1.85). Adolescents evaluated changes in symptoms during the course of the SAVE program in general (d?=?0.47) and attention deficits (d?=?0.45) as having significant effects. The reduction in symptoms (attention) was only moderately correlated with the target achievement.

Conclusion

The GAS method has been proven to be a practical instrument to assess treatment success for adolescents with ADHD. Further studies in a controlled design should focus on assessment of the influence of GAS as an intervention method.     

Some comments on “the silent cry” by mona serenius

Abstract

An unusual subjective account of war-time experience of the evacuation of Finnish children to Sweden. In retrospect, certain patterns of traumausation appear, especially in the psychological defences clearly related to separation, alienation, and frequently, the need to change language. I compare and contrast the Finnish experience with evacuations in the UK, which were overall less traumatic. Some psychoanalytic sources are supplied, relevant to the experiences, and to the characterological sequelae in the adults later. I criticise the majority of the post-war “scientific” reports on the data. Special reference is made to the value of the Finnish and Swedish War-Children's Societies.     

Cross-sectional and longitudinal confirmatory factor models for the german test anxiety inventory: A construct validation

Construct validity of the German Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI-G) was tested in two respects. Firstly, the purported four-dimensional structure of the TAI-G (comprising subscales Emotionality, Worry, Interference, and Lack of Confidence) as well as relations of the test anxiety dimensions to self-efficacy were tested. Secondly, the trait conception of the TAI-G was tested within the framework of Latent State-Trait theory. The TAI-G was given to a student sample (N=302) on three occasions with a time interval of 2 weeks along with a study-specific self-efficacy scale on occasion 1. Dimensionality assumptions as well as relations with self-efficacy were tested using cross-sectional second-order confirmatory factor analysis. The trait conception was tested separately for TAI-G subscales by specifying longitudinal confirmatory factor models (Latent State-Trait models) and by calculating variance proportions of manifest variables (Latent State-Trait coefficients) referring to different sources of systematic variance (person, situation, and method) based on parameter estimates of the models. Results were supportive of both the purported four-dimensional structure and hypothesized relationships to self-efficacy (i.e., acceptable model fit) as well as of the trait conception of test anxiety (i.e., acceptable model fit and high proportion of variance due to person component). Implications for further validation studies were discussed.     

Middle school students overestimate normative support for aggression and underestimate normative support for nonviolent problem‐solving strategies

This study tested five hypotheses related to the accuracy of students' perceptions of school norms for aggression and nonviolent problem‐solving strategies with two cohorts (ns = 852 and 968) of 6th‐grade students in 12 schools. Students consistently overestimated peer normative support for aggression and underestimated peer normative support for nonviolent problem‐solving strategies. This effect remained significant in tests of moderation by gender, ethnicity, and aggression level. Tests for moderation by the degree of provocation (e.g., if a student was hit first) and a test measuring actual norms from eighth graders and perceived norms from seventh graders suggested that the discrepancy was not due to self‐serving bias or social desirability. Longitudinal analysis found that the discrepancy remained through 8th grade. The discrepancy between actual and perceived norms has implications for risk and violence prevention, which are discussed.     

Scientific activities of the associazione di studi psicoanalitici (ASP) (Milan) for the years 1995 and 1996

This paper discusses Freud's "Oedipus complex" both in its elaboration of the "u¨ber-ich" and from a broader point of view, which relates to the development of man's moral sense. It is a disturbing experience to watch the continuous twilight of the function of the father, either as the head of the family or as the belief in a God or in a Truth that establishes a well-defined morality. At the same time, the function of the father as Lawgiver is supplanted by the function of money as the only value and the measure of all things. Since Freud's days, the field of morality has been increasingly invaded by the discourse of experts and administrators who determine Good and Evil with the intention of reaching a maximization of the profits and a more complete domination of our bodies. This paper questions the actual validity of the Oedipus complex as the organizer of modern man's sense of morality through its provocative title: "do we still have anything to do with the old blind man?"     

Intelligence and negation biases on the Conditional Inference Task: A dual-processes analysis

We examined a large set of conditional inference data compiled from several previous studies and asked three questions: How is normative performance related to intelligence? Does negative conclusion bias stem from Type 1 or Type 2 processing? Does implicit negation bias stem from Type 1 or Type 2 processing? Our analysis demonstrated that rejecting denial of the antecedent and affirmation of the consequent inferences was positively correlated with intelligence, while endorsing modus tollens inferences was not; that the occurrence of negative conclusion bias was related to the extent of Type 2 processing; and that the occurrence of implicit negation bias was not related to the extent of Type 2 processing. We conclude that negative conclusion bias is, at least in part, a product of Type 2 processing, while implicit negation bias is not.     

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Cortical function and related cognitive, language, and communication skills are genetically influenced. The auditory brainstem response to speech is linked to language skill, reading ability, cognitive skills, and speech‐in‐noise perception; however, the impact of shared genetic and environmental factors on the response has not been investigated. We assessed auditory brainstem responses to speech presented in quiet and background noise from (1) 23 pairs of same sex, same learning diagnosis siblings (Siblings), (2) 23 unrelated children matched on age, sex, IQ, and reading ability to one of the siblings (Reading‐Matched), and (3) 22 pairs of unrelated children matched on age and sex but not on reading ability to the same sibling (Age/Sex‐Matched). By quantifying response similarity as the intersubject response‐to‐response correlation for sibling pairs, reading‐matched pairs, and age‐ and sex‐matched pairs, we found that siblings had more similar responses than age‐ and sex‐matched pairs and reading‐matched pairs. Similarity of responses between siblings was as high as the similarity of responses collected from an individual over the course of the recording session. Responses from unrelated children matched on reading were more similar than responses from unrelated children matched only on age and sex, supporting previous data linking variations in auditory brainstem activity with variations in reading ability. These results suggest that auditory brainstem function can be influenced by siblingship and auditory‐based communication skills such as reading, motivating the use of speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses for assessing risk of reading and communication impairments in family members.     

The emergence of kind-based object individuation in infancy

Four experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants use perceptual property information in a complex object individuation task, using the violation-of-expectancy looking time method (Xu, 2002; Xu & Carey, 1996). Infants were shown two objects with different properties emerge and return behind an occluder, one at a time. The occluder was then removed, revealing either two objects (expected outcome, if property differences support individuation) or one object (unexpected outcome). In Experiments 1-3, infants failed to use color, size, or a combination of color, size, and pattern differences to establish a representation of two distinct objects behind an occluder. In Experiment 4, infants succeeded in using cross-basic-level-kind shape differences to establish a representation of two objects but failed to do so using within-basic-level-kind shape differences. Control conditions found that the methods were sensitive. Infants succeeded when provided unambiguous spatiotemporal information for two objects, and they encoded the property differences during these experiments. These findings suggest that by 12 months, different properties play different roles in a complex object individuation task. Certain salient shape differences enter into the computation of numerical distinctness of objects before other property differences such as color or size. Since shape differences are often correlated with object kind differences, these results converge with others in the literature that suggest that by the end of the first year of life, infants' representational systems begin to distinguish kinds and properties.     

Lesion analysis of the brain areas involved in language comprehension

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.