Social Skills Mediate the Association of ADHD and Depression in Preadolescents

Childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a replicated risk factor for depression, but the explanatory factors underlying this association have not been reliably identified. Given that social skills (i.e., cooperation, assertion, responsibility, self-control) are sensitive to early ADHD and predict later depression, we tested whether individual differences in social skills individually and collectively mediated predictions of depressive symptoms from early ADHD symptoms. In an ethnically diverse (50 % non-Caucasian) sample of 232 children with (n = 124) and without ADHD (n = 108) followed prospectively for two years (aged 5–10 at Wave 1; 7–12 at Wave 2), we gathered multi-informant (i.e., parent, teacher) and multi-method (e.g., rating scale, structured interview) assessment of key constructs. Using a multiple mediation framework with bootstrapping and statistical control of sex, Wave 1 depression, Wave 1 oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), Wave 1 anxiety, and Wave 2 ADHD symptoms, an independent mediation effect emerged for parent-rated self-control in the prediction of Wave 2 depression (parent-rated) from Wave 1 ADHD symptoms (combined parent and teacher ratings). Teacher-rated social skills at Wave 1 also collectively mediated this association, with teacher-rated assertion emerging as a unique mediator. We discuss the role of social skills in emergent depression among youth with ADHD and consider implications for prevention and intervention.     

Endocrine and emotional response to exclusion among women and men; cortisol,salivary alpha amylase,and mood

Background and Objectives: Social exclusion is ubiquitous and painful. Evolutionary models indicate sex differences in coping with social stress. Recent empirical data suggest different sex patterns in hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) and sympathetic–adrenal–medullary (SAM) reactivity. The present study sought to test this hypothesis.

Design: We examined differences in endocrine and emotional response to exclusion by using a virtual ball tossing paradigm (Cyberball). Saliva samples and mood ratings were collected to reflect levels before, and repeatedly following, exclusion.

Methods: The sample included 21 women and 23 men. Cortisol and salivary alpha amylase (sAA), biomarkers of the HPA and SAM systems, respectively, were used as indices of two arms of stress response.

Results: Following exclusion, all participants experienced mood worsening followed by mood improvement, with men reporting less distress than women. Women evinced decline in cortisol following the Cyberball task, whereas men’s cortisol levels showed a non-significant rise, and then decline, following exclusion.

Conclusions: Our results concur with previous findings showing SAM reactivity to be gender-neutral and HPA reactivity to be gender-divergent. Additional studies are needed to examine sex-specific response to social exclusion. Implications for individual differences in recovery from stress are discussed.     

A three-phase model of retirement decision making

The present article organizes prominent theories about retirement decision making around three different types of thinking about retirement: imagining the possibility of retirement, assessing when it is time to let go of long-held jobs, and putting concrete plans for retirement into action at present. It also highlights important directions for future research on retirement decision making, including perceptions of declining person-environment fit, the role of personality traits, occupational norms regarding retirement, broader criteria for assessing older workers' job performance, couples' joint decision making about retirement, the impact of self-funded and self-guided pension plans on retirement decisions, bridge employment before total withdrawal from the work force, and retirement decisions that are neither entirely forced nor voluntary in nature.     

Basic Information Processing Abilities at 11 years Account for Deficits in IQ Associated with Preterm Birth

Although it is well established that preterms as a group do poorly relative to their full-term peers on tests of global cognitive functioning, the basis for this relative deficiency is less understood. The present paper examines preterm deficits in core cognitive abilities and determines their role in mediating preterm/full-term differences in IQ. The performance of 11-year-old children born preterm (birth weight < 1750 g) and their full-term controls were compared on a large battery of 15 tasks, covering four basic cognitive domains — memory, attention, speed of processing and representational competence. The validity of these four domains was established using latent variables and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Preterms showed pervasive deficits within and across domains. Additionally, preterm deficits in IQ were completely mediated by these four cognitive domains in a structural equation model involving a cascade from elementary abilities (attention and speed), to more complex abilities (memory and representational competence), to IQ. The similarity of findings to those obtained with this cohort in infancy and toddlerhood suggests that preterm deficits persist — across time, across task, and from the non-verbal to the verbal period.     

Heightened sensitivity to emotional expressions in generalised anxiety disorder,compared to social anxiety disorder,and controls

Few studies have examined potential differences between social anxiety disorder (SAD) and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) in the sensitivity to detect emotional expressions. The present study aims to compare the detection of emotional expressions in SAD and GAD. Participants with a primary diagnosis of GAD (n?=?46), SAD (n?=?70), and controls (n?=?118) completed a morph movies task. The task presented faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expressions. Participants used a slide bar to view the movie frames from left to right, and to stop at the first frame where they perceived an emotion. The frame selected thus indicated the intensity of emotion required to identify the facial expression. Participants with GAD detected the onset of facial emotions at lower intensity of emotion than participants with SAD (p?=?0.002) and controls (p?=?0.039). In a multiple regression analysis controlling for age, race, and depressive symptom severity, lower frame at which the emotion was detected was independently associated and GAD diagnosis (B?=?–5.73, SE?=?1.74, p?相似文献   

What Are the “True” Statistics of the Environment?

A widespread assumption in the contemporary discussion of probabilistic models of cognition, often attributed to the Bayesian program, is that inference is optimal when the observer's priors match the true priors in the world—the actual “statistics of the environment.” But in fact the idea of a “true” prior plays no role in traditional Bayesian philosophy, which regards probability as a quantification of belief, not an objective characteristic of the world. In this paper I discuss the significance of the traditional Bayesian epistemic view of probability and its mismatch with the more objectivist assumptions about probability that are widely held in contemporary cognitive science. I then introduce a novel mathematical framework, the observer lattice, that aims to clarify this issue while avoiding philosophically tendentious assumptions. The mathematical argument shows that even if we assume that “ground truth” probabilities actually do exist, there is no objective way to tell what they are. Different observers, conditioning on different information, will inevitably have different probability estimates, and there is no general procedure to determine which one is right. The argument sheds light on the use of probabilistic models in cognitive science, and in particular on what exactly it means for the mind to be “tuned” to its environment.     

Modeling Statistical Insensitivity: Sources of Suboptimal Behavior

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes.     

Differential effects of mindful breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and loving-kindness meditation on decentering and negative reactions to repetitive thoughts

Decentering has been proposed as a potential mechanism of mindfulness-based interventions but has received limited empirical examination to date in experimental studies comparing mindfulness meditation to active comparison conditions. In the present study, we compared the immediate effects of mindful breathing (MB) to two alternative stress-management techniques: progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) and loving-kindness meditation (LKM) to test whether decentering is unique to mindfulness meditation or common across approaches. Novice meditators (190 female undergraduates) were randomly assigned to complete one of three 15-min stress-management exercises (MB, PMR, or LKM) presented by audio recording. Immediately after the exercise, participants completed measures of decentering, frequency of repetitive thoughts during the exercise, and degree of negative reaction to thoughts. As predicted, participants in the MB condition reported greater decentering relative to the other two conditions. The association between frequency of repetitive thought and negative reactions to thoughts was relatively weaker in the MB condition than in the PMR and LKM conditions, in which these two variables were strongly and positively correlated. Consistent with the construct of decentering, the relative independence between these two variables in the MB condition suggests that mindful breathing may help to reduce reactivity to repetitive thoughts. Taken together, results help to provide further evidence of decentering as a potential mechanism that distinguishes mindfulness practice from other credible stress-management approaches.