Differences in cognitive control in children and adolescents with combined and inattentive subtypes of ADHD

The aim of the present study was to investigate the ability of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder-combined subtype (ADHD-C) and predominantly inattentive subtype (ADHD-PI) to direct their attention and to exert cognitive control in a forced attention dichotic listening (DL) task. Twenty-nine, medication-naive participants with ADHD-C, 42 with ADHD-PI, and 40 matched healthy controls (HC) between 9 and 16 years were assessed. In the DL task, two different auditory stimuli (syllables) are presented simultaneously, one in each ear. The participants are asked to report the syllable they hear on each trial with no instruction on focus of attention or to explicitly focus attention and to report either the right- or left-ear syllable. The DL procedure is presumed to reflect different cognitive processes: perception (nonforced condition/NF), attention (forced-right condition/FR), and cognitive control (forced-left condition/FL). As expected, all three groups had normal perception and attention. The children and adolescents with ADHD-PI showed a significant right-ear advantage also during the FL condition, while the children and adolescents in the ADHD-C group showed a no-ear advantage and the HC showed a significant left-ear advantage in the FL condition. This suggests that the ADHD subtypes differ in degree of cognitive control impairment. Our results may have implications for further conceptualization, diagnostics, and treatment of ADHD subtypes.     

Formal Defensive Aspects of Cognition and Modes of Thinking Exemplified by Freud's Case History of the Rat Man

Autoerotic gratifications are necessary for children suffering from a disturbed mother relation, and constitute symptoms of the same (jactatis capitis, extreme masturbation, etc.). The origins of the autoerotic functions go as far back as the foetal stage (thumbsucking). In the habits of so-called normal human beings, they also have an important stabilizing function to psychic autonomy. We are accompanied by primary and sublimated autoerotic functions all through our lives, which offer comfort and satisfaction during the different vicissitudes of life. Freud's monistic drive theory seems more plausible to me than his later dualistic theories. In accordance with the former, man can regress from object-libidinal cathexes into autoerotic positions when feeling psychically or physically threatened, and during normal conditions when asleep, sleep constituting a normal narcissistic state.     

Extraordinary consumer experiences: Why immersion and transformation cause trouble

This paper presents and discusses how consumers are transformed in and out of immersion during extraordinary, long‐lasting wilderness canoeing experiences. Based on a hermeneutic multi‐phase empirical approach, we show how extraordinary experiences can be dynamic, multifaceted, and emergent. The positive connotations of prior research are questioned as we find that consumers face various paradoxes and ambiguities throughout the various consumption phases. While a major part of research today focuses on the co‐creation efforts of consumers when they combine various on‐site resource of experiencescapes, our findings point to the importance of understanding consumer resources. The distinction held between the ordinary and the extraordinary does not hold within the present context, and we discuss how role conflicts may influence transformation and immersion during consumption of experiences.     

Late reaction times identify MCI

A group of 172 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and 79 healthy control participants (HC) were tested on simple reaction time (SRT). There was a significant difference between MCI and HC in mean SRT. The test could be partitioned into five segments of 16 trials each, but RT's were not always available for each partition. However, scores from each segment for 166 MCI and 41 of the HC's were available. These data showed that a significant interaction between RT‐partition and diagnostic category was the main source of the difference between groups. The interaction indicated that MCI patients performed at about the same level as HC in the initial three of the five segments of the test, but were significantly impaired during the last two segments of the 80 trials. The results were interpreted as impaired sustained attention among a large part of the MCI group, and the study shows the importance of taking into account all avaliable data resulting from this type of test.     

Emotional Stroop via Internet among individuals with eating disorders

The present study investigated whether Stroop interference in eating disordered individuals for food - and body-related words, as repeatedly found previously using standard emotional Stroop tasks, would also be demonstrated when using an Internet based emotional Stroop task. Participants were anorexic women (n= 13), bulimic women (n= 20), non-clinically eating disordered women nevertheless over-concerned about eating and body appearance (n= 27) and normal control women (n= 31). Bulimic individuals showed Stroop interference for body-related words whereas anorexic individuals showed Stroop interference for food-related words. The present results thus suggest that administration of the emotional Stroop task is possible via the Internet. Furthermore, it is possible that the time consuming response delivery, relative to previous studies, could lead to Stroop interference only for the most emotionally significant information, in turn, differentiating between the core concerns of anorexic and bulimic individuals.     

A retrospective 60-year review of Murray Sidman's Tactics of Scientific Research and some of its influence on behavior analysis

Murray Sidman's book, Tactics of Scientific Research: Evaluating Experimental Data in Psychology, published in 1960, has been called the bible of the experimental analysis of behavior and has been a major influence on basic as well as applied research in behavior analysis. The contents of the early reviews of the book are summarized and the commemoration in The Behavior Analyst at the 30^th anniversary of the book is reviewed along with Sidman's comments on updates that he would have made if he were to revise or supplement the book. Included are some later remarks by Sidman regarding specific issues in Tactics. Continuous rates of citations are displayed and show the sustained relevance of the book, and selected themes from the book are discussed. Finally, experiences from using Tactics in lab courses and in graduate-level courses on scientific method are recapitulated, including questions raised by students, and Sidman's answers to those questions. Tactics is a true classic in behavior analysis.     

Emotional eating and cognitive conflicts as predictors of binge eating disorder in patients with obesity

Background/Objectives: Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is often associated with obesity. In order to identify the variables that allow to better detect the presence of BED, people with overnutrition were compared with and without BED in the presence of cognitive conflicts, eating symptoms and anxious-depressive symptoms. The inclusion of cognitive conflicts had been relevant in bulimia studies but had not been investigated with respect to BED. Method: Two groups with obesity were evaluated, one without BED (OB, n = 54) and the other with BED (OB-BED, n = 48), using a social-demographic questionnaire as well as a semi-structured interview to assess BED, questionnaires (DASS-21, EDE-Q, EEQ) and the Repertory Grid Technique. Results: Overall, the OB-BED group presented more conflicts and more symptoms. The model that best differentiated between the groups included emotional eating and level of cognitive conflicts, correctly classifying 91.4% of the sample. Conclusion: These results highlight the role played by cognitive conflicts and emotional eating as differentiating elements between OB and OB-BED, with a high level of predictive accuracy.     

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.     

Experiential Avoidance and Rumination in Parents of Children on Cancer Treatment: Relationships with Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Symptoms of Depression

We conducted a cross-sectional survey study to investigate whether there is a relationship between experiential avoidance (EA), rumination, post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), and symptoms of depression, in parents of children on cancer treatment. Data from 79 parents (55 mothers) of 79 children with a median of three months since their cancer diagnosis were included in cross-sectional analyses. EA and rumination were positively correlated with PTSS and symptoms of depression. EA and rumination did not provide incremental explained variance in PTSS over and above that explained by symptoms of depression, while controlling for symptoms of anxiety and demographic characteristics. However, EA and rumination provided incremental explained variance in symptoms of depression over and above that explained by PTSS, while controlling for symptoms of anxiety and demographic characteristics. Rumination and EA are important constructs in the understanding of PTSS and symptoms of depression in parents of children on cancer treatment. Future research should delineate the temporal relationships between these constructs.