Methylphenidate and cognitive therapy with add children: A methodological reconsideration

The present doubleblind study examined the effects of methylphenidate, cognitive therapy, and their combination in attention deficitdisordered (ADD) children. Four treatment groups were compared on measures of attentional deployment and cognitive style, tests of academic achievement, and behavioral rating scales. In contrast to a previous study conducted in this laboratory, children in this study were not receiving medication during posttesting. Results were interpreted to suggest that measurable effects of stimulant medication dissipate rapidly upon discontinuation of pharmacotherapy. The combination of methylphenidate and cognitive therapy was not found to be any more efficacious than either of the treatments studied alone. Discussion suggests that medication status at follow-up is an essential feature of research design.This research was supported in full by U.S. Public Health Service Grant No. MH 37-628 from the National Institute of Mental Health, Psychopharmacology Branch, and by Biomedical Research Award No. RR 0715807 from the National Institutes of Health, each awarded to R. T. Brown. Placebo and methylphenidate were supplied by CIBA-GEIGY, Summit, New Jersey. The authors are grateful to Dr. Rute Medenis and the entire staff at the University of Illinois Pediatrics Clinic for their valuable assistance and kind support throughout the project. The authors would also like to thank Avery L. Spunt, R.Ph., College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois, for his assistance in packaging the medication and monitoring compliance; Arthur I. Neyhus, Ph.D., Coordinator of Child Study Facility, University of Illinois at Chicago, for his assistance in evaluation; and J. Scott Allen, Jimmy Bruce, Robert Miller, Michael Mazius, and Steven Orenczuk, for their assistance in training of the children.The contributions of these authors are equal.     

Acute care treatment services (acts): A model program for providing acute psychiatric services in a homelike environment in an institutional setting

The Acute Care Treatment Services (ACTS) Program at Anna Mental Health and Developmental Center in Anna, Illinois, offers a unique, homelike environment for many of the institution's acute recipients. The relaxed, natural environment (i.e., pleasant cottages free from the disturbing behaviors often displayed by chronically mentally ill recipients) aims to stabilize acute recipients, expedite their return to the community, and reduce the likelihood of their later rehospitalization by linking them with necessary community mental health resources. Chisquare analyses demonstrated significantly fewer subsequent hospitalizations for ACTS recipients after their second readmission than that of statewide comparison groups. The viability of treating acute mental illness in a natural setting on an institution's grounds is discussed.     

Totemic therapy

Totemic therapists, those recognized as healers because of their identification with an ethnic subculture, religious group, or social cause, are a factor in modern society often overlooked or underestimated as a mental health resource. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of totemic therapy, such therapists will be in increasing demand as pluralistic social trends continue. It is therefore realistic to ask how their skills may be increased and their services better utilized.Ronald R. Lee, Ph.D., was born in Melbourne, Australia, and received his Ph.D. in Pastoral Psychology from Northwestern University/Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1965. He is Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and is a Diplomate in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.     

SELF-CONTROL TRAINING IN THE CLASSROOM: A REVIEW AND CRITIQUE

Self-control training in classroom settings is becoming widespread. Establishing effective self- rather than externally controlled behavior modification programs in schools would enable children to control their own academic and social behavior, while enabling teachers to devote more time to teaching. The following components of self-control are reviewed in the present article: self-recording, self-evaluation, self-determination of contingencies, and self-instruction. Self-control strategies designed for the maintenance of appropriate classroom behavior, and issues associated with self-control training, such as the reliability of self-observation, response maintenance, generalization, and the role of external control, are examined. Finally, suggestions for maximizing the potential effectiveness of self-control training in the classroom (e.g., teaching self-observational procedures, teaching students to provide themselves with instructions and praise), as well as future areas for experimental investigation (e.g., social changes that may be associated with self-control procedures), are presented.     

Induced-compliance attitude change: Once more with feeling

The present study investigated the impact of the perception of emotion on attitude change in active participation situations. Subjects wrote counterattitudinal statements while their emotional experiences were independently manipulated by altering their facial expressions. Subjects who were led to experience additional negative affect changed their attitudes significantly more than did subjects who experienced no added emotional input. Conversely, subjects who were led to experience additional positive affect changed their attitudes significantly less than subjects in the other conditions. These results and their implications are discussed.     

Evaluation of Counselor Effectiveness

This literature review summarizes research in the general area of the evaluation of counselor effectiveness. Research into the role of the counselor continues, and is typically done in reference to a specific setting. The state of the art is such, however, that the evaluation of the counseling process continues to focus primarily on the presence or absence of the core facilitative conditions; program evaluation, conversely, is becoming more sophisticated. Counselor educators have focused on means of presenting counseling experiences and of providing feedback regarding trainee performance and evaluating that performance; much of this work has been directed toward the counseling practicum. The implications of the movement toward certification or licensure are discussed with reference to both practitioners and counselor educators.     

The discriminative efficiency of the Bayley Scales of infant development

This sudy was designed to determine the discriminative efficiency of the Bayley Mental and Motor Scales for classifying infants as neurologically suspicious and neurologically normal. The two groups employed in the study were formed on the basis of the results from comprehensive neurological examinations performed at ages 1 and 7. Three discriminant function analyses were conducted, one for each scale separately and a third incorporating both scales using a stepwise procedure. Efficiency was measured in terms of number of correct and incorrect classifications, false positive and false negative errors, and validity coefficients. Comparisons among the analyses were examined by means of relative discriminative power and incremental validity. The findings suggested that the Motor Scale provides the most accurate identification of infants with suspected neurological impairments. A statistically significant likelihood discriminant function derived from both scales yielded some additional discriminative power. The law of parsimony, however, dictated the use of the single Motor Scale.The author is grateful to Drs. Janet Hardy and Doris Welcher for providing the data upon which this research was based and to Dr. Patricia Gold for collecting the data. The data were gathered for the Johns Hopkins Collaborative Perinatal Project and supported by the National Institutes of Health (NINDS), the U.S. Children's Bureau through the Maryland State Department of Health, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, the Thomas Wilson Sanitarium, the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Fluid Research Fund, The Johns Hopkins University, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the facilities of The Johns Hopkins Medical Computing Center. Anonymous reviewers are also acknowledged for their helpful suggestions in improving the overall clarity of the paper.     

A critical review of a recent decade of stuttering research

The purpose of the present investigation was to catalogue and evaluate portions of the literature on stuttering from 1967 to 1977. Of particular interest was the identification of the research literature. Of 287 articles located and evaluated, 181 were research reports. These reports were categorized according to topics, subject selection, subjects' characteristics, type of research designs and use of randomization, reliability, and statistical methods. Unhappily, many of the faults identified in reviews ten to twenty years earlier tended to persist, and many of the deficiencies recently cited by authorities in the field were found to characterize this literature.     

Unconditional-stimulus locus and interstimulus-interval shift in rabbit(Oryctolagus cuniculus) nictitating membrane conditioning

The nictitating membrane response of rabbits was conditioned at a 200 msec interstimulus interval (ISI) with either circumorbital (C) or paraorbital (P) shock as the unconditional-stimulus locus. After 3 acquisition days half of each group was shifted to a 700 msec interstimulus interval. Results indicated: (1) more rapid acquisition for Group C, (2) postshift response decrements for both groups, (3) more rapid and stable, as well as complete return to preshift performance levels for Group C. Results were discussed in terms of the response-shaping hypothesis and the contiguity-substitution hypothesis in explaining both conditional response emergence and subsequent modifications of CR topography.     

Integration of information in visual search

Two experiments studied how information about the nontarget items in a visual search task is used for the control of the search. The first experiment used the detection of “hurdle” stimuli to demonstrate that efficient memory representations of the context items can be established within each particular trial. This finding is explained by a model for the short-term integration of context information. The second experiment which varied the complexity of the local but not the global context provided some information about the nature of the integration operations involved. In its final version the model postulates two stages of processing with independent mechanisms of integration. Spatial integration at the first stage deletes repetitions within small samples. Temporal integration at the second stage stores and primes the memory representations of the context items over larger intervals. It is assumed that transient temporal integration within trials is mediated by the same mechanism that underlies permanent temporal integration between trials.