Deficit in Response Inhibition in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Impact of Motivation?

To date, neuropsychological and psycho-physiological studies have revealed inconsistent results regarding an executive or motivational deficit explaining the response inhibition deficit in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Research on differentiating neuropsychological processes in ADHD subtypes is still scarce. Therefore, the motivational impact on response inhibition among boys with ADHD was examined in this study. In the first study, 19 boys with ADHD-combined type (ADHD-C) and 19 age-matched healthy control subjects performed a modified Go/No-Go task with the following experimental conditions: neutral, auditory feedback, reward, response cost, and reward/response cost. Performance and physiological data (heart rate and skin conductance responses) were recorded. In a second study with the modified Go/No-Go task, data for six children with ADHD-C, six with ADHD-inattentive subtype (ADHD-I), and six healthy control subjects were compared. Neither of the two studies revealed group by condition interactions. In study 1, boys with ADHD-C generally made more commissions and omissions compared to the control group. However, feedback significantly improved the response inhibition in all children. The heart rate of all children was increased in the two conditions of reward and reward/response cost. Study 2 revealed that children with ADHD-I responded more slowly and showed increased reaction time variability compared to both other groups. The present study supports an executive rather than a motivational deficit in the response inhibition among children with ADHD-C, though further results also indicate the role of auditory feedback on response inhibition. Additionally, the findings support the differentiation of ADHD-C and ADHD-I, suggesting that ADHD-I children are characterized by a sluggish cognitive tempo.     

Primitive Drivers: Racial Science and Citizenship in the Motor Age

Lay participation in the deliberation of techno-scientific issues has become an important objective of policy making in many countries. Using the example of a series of Round Table discussions dealing with genome research allows us to analyse the ways in which the participants of this event construct their arguments during the discussion. Explaining the observed discursive strategies we focus on performative aspects of the deliberation process. In such a way it is taken into account how the setting of a given participatory process influences the ways in which participants are enrolled and enact their participation accordingly. In the analysed case, the setting was not taken as a given, but public participation and its discursive framework became itself subject to negotiation during the process. Hence, the discursive power of individual experiences and the legitimacy of personal interests as the argumentative basis were negotiated during the Round Table discussions. The participants only rarely grounded their statements in practical knowledge and individual experiences. Instead we saw them performing other discursive repertoires, e.g. drawing on societal benefits. Individual perspectives were often transcended and articulated in the form of super-individual arguments which endowed participants' statements with substantial discursive power and provided an alternative rationale for contributing to the deliberation without explicit reference to personal experiences. More broadly, the observed reluctance of the participants to speak-up for their personal interests can be seen as a result of a political culture that favours the advancement of de-individualised perspectives in public deliberation.     

THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as information waiting to be rewritten

We report here on a series of interaction-intensive, interdisciplinary workshops to foster collaboration among those who teach, study, and engage with the public about scientific developments and social change—the New England Workshop on Science and Social Change. We include one line of thinking that fed into the workshops and present an analysis of how they contribute to participants developing their interest and skills in collaboration. Workshop evaluations suggest that people are moved to develop themselves as collaborators when they view an experience or training as transformative. Four R's—respect, risk, revelation, and re-engagement—point to the important conditions for interactions among researchers to be experienced as transformative. Three considerations lie behind the focus on the process side of the workshops, not the specific workshop topics: (1) how best to fill in for readers what they missed out on by not being there; (2) workshops and meetings are a ubiquitous part of the culture of science and technology studies (STS) so it is valuable to examine this aspect of our own culture with a view to promoting positive changes; and (3) in some scientific fields organized multi-person collaborative processes form a highly valorized aspect of the culture of science, so reflection on experiences of participation and collaboration in STS might inform our analyses of fields that emphasize collaboration and group processes. Indeed, the authors' own involvement in the workshops extends our own STS work on actor networks and ‘heterogeneous engineering’, that is, the mobilization of a variety of resources by diverse agents spanning different realms of social action.     

Reinforcement sensitivity theory as a predictor of senior-executive performance

This paper develops and tests links between the reinforcement sensitivity theory of personality and senior-executive job performance, hypothesising that the theory’s personality traits, known as ‘BIS’ and ‘BAS’, will interact to predict performance. 167 chief and second-tier executives completed Carver and White’s (1994)BIS/BAS Scales, and had their overall performance rated by a superior or peer using four items. Structural equation modeling showed that while BAS has no main effect and BIS has a marginally significant effect on performance (p = 0.07), BIS and BAS interact to predict performance (p = 0.01), the optimal scenario being a combination of high BAS and low BIS. These results show the importance of testing traits’ interactions in applied personality research.     

The social unconscious in persons,groups and societies,Vol 1: mainly theory; and Trauma and organizations

This paper considers the emotional life of the infant in the incubator and develops a new psychological theory which is called the ‘incubator psyche’. Theory building is advanced from three main discourses: (1) psychoanalysis, (2) neo-natal nursing and (3) psychology. A case study of Corey, a 7-year-old boy, who had been delivered prematurely, with a hole in his heart, and spent the first 6 weeks of post-natal life in an incubator, is presented to illustrate how aspects of an incubator psyche might be clinically manifest. The concept of an incubator psyche is advanced with reference to a particular kind of second-skin formation (Bick, 1968, The experience of the skin in early object relations, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 484–486). It is proposed that the incubator psyche characterises a client's mental functioning exercised as an environmental sensibility that could be understood in terms of the total transference situation (Klein, 1952, The origins of transference, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33, 433–438; Joseph, 1985, Transference: The total situation, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66, 447–454). Implications for practice are considered advocating particular attention to the setting.     

Front-line services,complexity, research and policy

The evidence-based culture of modern mental health policy and service delivery is being extended through funded efforts to accelerate implementation of research findings in practice settings. In this paper, we argue that this linear model of research and policy-making is profoundly ill adapted to the nature of practice realities and real-world policy-making processes. Both need to be re-conceptualised using the theoretical and practical resources deriving from modern complexity theory. A short case study illustrates the nature of ‘complexity’, the reframing of the notion of ‘evidence’ it implies and the different relationship between research, practice and policy that flows from this more attuned model of mental health and therapeutic processes.     

Is a change in work motivation related to a change in mental well-being?

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of changes on work motivation and the effect of the changes on future mental well-being. This prospective study comprised 577 employees who were followed up 18 months after a comprehensive baseline measurement. The response rate was 81% for the baseline and 72% for the follow-up. The results show that both negative and positive changes in work motivation over time (18 months) were related to exhaustion. A similar correlation was found between negative changes in work motivation and depression. The results show that employees with a decreased level of work motivation had a higher risk of experiencing more exhaustion and depression in the future. Thus, investing in activities to promote work motivation may be an effective means of preventing long-term sick leave for stress-related mental illness and of providing energy for successful career advancement.     

Twenty-Five Years of Change in Working with Partner Abusers—Part I: Observations from the Trenches About Community and System-Level Changes

The past 2 ½ decades have witnessed explosive growth in research and practice in the area of intimate partner violence, especially regarding perpetrators. The author reflects on his observations of key community and systemic developments in the field of research and treatment with batterers. The author examines systemic changes that have facilitated growth in the field and examines related issues and controversies. The author calls for continued development of an empirical base to guide both theory development and practice standards. The author also calls for openness to change within the field so that new developments will lead to appropriate dialogue and debate, increased dissemination and translation of new research findings into formats that are useful to clinicians, and accountability and change in abusers.     

Developing Guidelines for Domestic Violence Offender Programs

Summary

This article reviews research on domestic violence that can help inform the development of guidelines for programs for men who batter. It also illustrates some successes and problems in other fields that might be instructive for the domestic violence field. Firm conclusions about “best practice” guidelines for intervention seem to be premature because of flaws in evaluation studies. In addition, there is growing evidence of variability among men who batter on dimensions such as severity of violence, childhood traumas, generality of violence and personality traits. Programs also need to be able to respond to motivational and cultural difference among abusers. Existence of variability implies the need for multiple forms of interventions.