Investigating Friendship Difficulties in the Pathway from ADHD to Depressive Symptoms. Can Parent–Child Relationships Compensate?

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with friendship difficulties. This may partly account for the increasingly recognised association between ADHD and subsequent depression. Little is known about the types of friendship difficulties that could contribute to the association between ADHD and depressive symptoms and whether other relationships, such as parent–child relationships, can mitigate against potential adverse effects of friendship difficulties. In a representative UK school sample (n?=?1712), three main features of friendship (presence of friends, friendship quality and characteristics of the individual’s classroom friendship group) were assessed in a longitudinal study with two assessment waves (W1, W2) during the first year of secondary school (children aged 11-12 years). These friendship features (W1) were investigated as potential mediators of the prospective association between teacher-rated ADHD symptoms (W1) and self-rated depressive symptoms (W2) seven months later. Parent–child relationship quality (W1) was tested as a moderator of any indirect effects of ADHD on depression via friendship. ADHD symptoms were inversely associated with friendship presence, friendship quality and positive characteristics of classroom friendship groups. Depressive symptoms were inversely associated with presence and quality of friendships. Friendship quality had indirect effects in the association between ADHD and subsequent depressive symptoms. There was some evidence of moderated mediation, whereby indirect effects via friendship quality attenuated slightly as children reported warmer parent–child relationships. This highlights the importance of considering the quality of friendships and parent–child relationships in children with ADHD symptoms. Fostering good quality relationships may help disrupt the link between ADHD symptomology and subsequent depression risk.

     

Would you be happier if you moved more? Physical activity focusing illusion

Current Psychology - Research shows that individuals who are more physically active also report greater happiness. However, subjective well-being is prone to cognitive biases. For instance, people...     

Singular troubles with singleton socrates

I identify a problem for Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics for ground: it excludes a range of plausible structures of grounding hierarchies. Specifically, there is an attractive view about the grounds of the existence of individual singleton sets which is inconsistent under the truthmaker account. I then develop a modification of the truthmaker account which avoids this difficulty and show that it preserves most of the desirable features of the original account, such as the propositional logic of ground it yields.     

Psychological Distress,Anxiety, and Depression of Cancer-Affected BRCA1/2 Mutation Carriers: a Systematic Review

Understanding the intermediate- and long-term psychological consequences of genetic testing for cancer patients has led to encouraging research, but a clear consensus of the psychosocial impact and clinical routine for cancer-affected BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers is still missing. We performed a systematic review of intermediate- and long-term studies investigating the psychological impact like psychological distress, anxiety, and depression in cancer-affected BRCA mutation carriers compared to unaffected mutation carriers. This review included the screening of 1243 studies. Eight intermediate- and long-term studies focusing on distress, anxiety, and depression symptoms among cancer-affected mutation carriers at least six months after the disclosure of genetic testing results were included. Studies reported a great variety of designs, methods, and patient outcomes. We found evidence indicating that cancer-affected mutation carriers experienced a negative effect in relation to psychological well-being in terms of an increase in symptoms of distress, anxiety, and depression in the first months after test disclosure. In the intermediate- and long-term, no significant clinical relevant symptoms occurred. However, none of the included studies used specific measurements, which can clearly identify psychological burdens of cancer-affected mutation carriers. We concluded that current well-implemented distress screening instruments are not sufficient for precisely identifying the psychological burden of genetic testing. Therefore, future studies should implement coping strategies, specific personality structures, the impact of genetic testing, supportive care needs and disease management behaviour to clearly screen for the possible intermediate- and long-term psychological impact of a positive test disclosure.     

The Impact of Parent Empowerment in Children’s Mental Health Services on Parenting Stress

Emotional and behavioral (EB) problems in children are associated with increased perceptions of strain in parenting. Among children receiving services, parenting stress has been linked to initiating services for their children, and may strain the relationship between parent and child. In contrast, parental engagement and empowerment in services is an important quality indicator for positive treatment outcomes. However, no known studies have examined the association between parent empowerment in their child’s services and their perceptions of stress related to parenting a child with significant mental health needs. Further, no studies have explored whether empowerment moderates the relationship between the child’s symptoms and parental perceptions of stress. The current study examined the impact of child EB problems and parent empowerment on parenting stress. Among a sample of 525 parents of children receiving school-based services for disruptive behavior disorders, child EB problems significantly predicted parenting stress. Parent empowerment also correlated with lower parenting stress, as hypothesized. Although parent empowerment was not found to moderate the relationship between child symptomatology and parenting stress, the relationship between parent empowerment and parenting stress differed based on child gender and age. Parent empowerment was associated with lower parenting stress more for parents of females and younger children than for parents of males and older children.     

Free-energy and the brain

If one formulates Helmholtz’s ideas about perception in terms of modern-day theories one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts. Using constructs from statistical physics it can be shown that the problems of inferring what cause our sensory inputs and learning causal regularities in the sensorium can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory information is generated. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of the brain’s organisation and responses. In this paper, we suggest that these perceptual processes are just one emergent property of systems that conform to a free-energy principle. The free-energy considered here represents a bound on the surprise inherent in any exchange with the environment, under expectations encoded by its state or configuration. A system can minimise free-energy by changing its configuration to change the way it samples the environment, or to change its expectations. These changes correspond to action and perception, respectively, and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment implies that the system’s state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of free-energy can explain its dynamics and structure.     

The effect of brief auditory stimuli on visual apparent motion

When two discrete stimuli are presented in rapid succession, observers typically report a movement of the lead stimulus toward the lag stimulus. The object of this study was to investigate crossmodal effects of irrelevant sounds on this illusion of visual apparent motion. Observers were presented with two visual stimuli that were temporally separated by interstimulus onset intervals from 0 to 350 ms. After each trial, observers classified their impression of the stimuli using a categorisation system. The presentation of short sounds intervening between the visual stimuli facilitated the impression of apparent motion relative to baseline (visual stimuli without sounds), whereas sounds presented before the first and after the second visual stimulus as well as simultaneously presented sounds reduced the motion impression. The results demonstrate an effect of the temporal structure of irrelevant sounds on visual apparent motion that is discussed in light of a related multisensory phenomenon, 'temporal ventriloquism', on the assumption that sounds can attract lights in the temporal dimension.