The Role of Teachers in the Assessment of Children Suspected of Having AD/HD

Gill Salmon and Amanda Kirby

Correspondence to Gill Salmon
Trehafod Child and Family Clinic
Waunarlwydd Road
Cockett
Swansea SA2 0GB
Email: salmogm@doctors.org.uk

ABSTRACT

In the light of recent guidance published by The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) on the diagnosis and management of attention deficit disorders in children, young persons and adults, Gill Salmon, a consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist based in Swansea, South Wales, and Amanda Kirby, Professor of Developmental Disorders in Education based at the University of Wales, Newport, give an overview of the rationale for involving teachers in the assessment of children with AD/HD and the development and implementation of subsequent educational interventions. They also review the resulting training implications; explore some of the obstacles to multi-agency, multi-disciplinary working; and examine how current special educational needs policy goes hand-in-hand with the tiered approach to provision of child and adolescent mental health services in offering a graduated response to these children.

KEYWORDS
attention deficit disorders • teachers • assessment • intervention

Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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The influence of sex on the course and psychiatric correlates of ADHD from childhood to adolescence: A longitudinal study

Michael C. Monuteaux,1 Eric Mick,1 Stephen V. Faraone,2 and Joseph Biederman1

1. Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychiatry and Adult ADHD, Psychiatry Department, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 

2. SUNY Genetics Research Program and Department of Psychiatry, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA

Background: 

Little is known about the influence of sex on the course of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its comorbid psychiatric conditions. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of sex on the course and psychiatric correlates of ADHD from childhood into adolescence.

Methods:  

Two identically designed, longitudinal, case–control family studies of male and female probands with and without ADHD and their siblings were combined. All subjects were blindly assessed with structured diagnostic interviews. Among subjects with a lifetime history of ADHD (n = 471, mean age 11.5 ± 4.3 years at baseline), we used linear growth curve models to estimate the effect of time on the change in ADHD symptoms, and whether this effect differed by sex. We also we examined the effect of sex on the association between ADHD and the longitudinal progression of comorbid psychopathology using structural equation models. 

Results:  

We found no evidence that sex moderated the effect of age on ADHD symptoms; in both genders, age exhibited a similar effect on the decline of ADHD symptoms. However, the female sample demonstrated greater stability in comorbid psychopathology from childhood into adolescence. Furthermore, we found that the stability of comorbid psychopathology in females remained significant after accounting for the correlation between adolescent psychopathology and adolescent ADHD. In males, childhood and adolescent comorbid psychopathology were no longer correlated when adolescent ADHD was taken into account. 

Conclusions: 

Our findings indicate that while the course of ADHD across childhood and adolescence did not differ between males and females, patterns of psychiatric comorbidity were conditional on sex. Future studies should explicitly test how sex modifies the associations between ADHD and risk factors and ADHD and associated functional outcomes. 

Keywords: ADHD, growth curve, sex, longitudinal, structural equation model.

Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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Understanding the Role of Neuroscience in Brain Based Products: A Guide for Educators and Consumers

Lesley J. Sylvan and Joanna A. Christodoulou

Harvard University, Graduate School of Education
Address correspondence to Joanna A. Christodoulou, Harvard Graduate
School of Education, Longfellow Hall, Appian Way, Cambridge, MA
02138; e-mail: jac765@mail.harvard.edu.

ABSTRACT

The term brain based is often used to describe learning theories, principles, and products. Although there have been calls urging educators to be cautious in interpreting and using such material, consumers may find it challenging to understand the role of the brain and to discriminate among brain based products to determine which would be suitable for specific educational goals.We offer a framework for differentiating the multiple meanings of the brain based label and guidelines for educators and consumers to use when evaluating educational products labeled as brain based. The guidelines include: identifying educational goals and target student populations, aligning goals and product purposes, reviewing product merits, identifying benefits and limitations of the product, and characterizing the product’s impact on behavioral performance.

Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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The Moral Life of Babies (7)

Paul Bloom

is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

The evolutionary psychologist has a quick response to this: To say that a biological trait evolves for a purpose doesn’t mean that it always functions, in the here and now, for that purpose. Sexual arousal, for instance, presumably evolved because of its connection to making babies; but of course we can get aroused in all sorts of situations in which baby-making just isn’t an option — for instance, while looking at pornography. Similarly, our impulse to help others has likely evolved because of the reproductive benefit that it gives us in certain contexts — and it’s not a problem for this argument that some acts of niceness that people perform don’t provide this sort of benefit. (And for what it’s worth, giving up a bus seat for an old lady, although the motives might be psychologically pure, turns out to be a coldbloodedly smart move from a Darwinian standpoint, an easy way to show off yourself as an attractively good person.)

The general argument that critics like Wallace and D’Souza put forward, however, still needs to be taken seriously. The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with; moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible relation to our reproductive success and don’t appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved adaptations. Many of us care about strangers in faraway lands, sometimes to the extent that we give up resources that could be used for our friends and family; many of us care about the fates of nonhuman animals, so much so that we deprive ourselves of pleasures like rib-eye steak and veal scaloppine. We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all; we see racism and sexism as evil; we reject slavery and genocide; we try to love our enemies. Of course, our actions typically fall short, often far short, of our moral principles, but these principles do shape, in a substantial way, the world that we live in. It makes sense then to marvel at the extent of our moral insight and to reject the notion that it can be explained in the language of natural selection. If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger.

But it is not present in babies. In fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind. There’s plenty of research showing that babies have within-group preferences: 3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions.

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify your actions, and you say, “Because I wanted to,” this is just an expression of selfish desire. But explanations like “It was my turn” or “It’s my fair share” are potentially moral, because they imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same. This is the sort of argument that could be convincing to a neutral observer and is at the foundation of standards of justice and law. The philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out that this notion of impartiality can be found in religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls’s landmark theory of justice. This is an insight that emerges within communities of intelligent, deliberating and negotiating beings, and it can override our parochial impulses.

The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it’s incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. The biologist Richard Dawkins was right, then, when he said at the start of his book “The Selfish Gene,” “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.” Or as a character in the Kingsley Amis novel “One Fat Englishman” puts it, “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.”

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

Source: www.nytimes.com

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The Moral Life of Babies (6)

Paul Bloom

is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

Dispensing justice like this is a more elaborate conceptual operation than merely preferring good to bad, but there are still-more-elaborate moral calculations that adults, at least, can easily make. For example: Which individual would you prefer — someone who rewarded good guys and punished bad guys or someone who punished good guys and rewarded bad guys? The same amount of rewarding and punishing is going on in both cases, but by adult lights, one individual is acting justly and the other isn’t. Can babies see this, too?

To find out, we tested 8-month-olds by first showing them a character who acted as a helper (for instance, helping a puppet trying to open a box) and then presenting a scene in which this helper was the target of a good action by one puppet and a bad action by another puppet. Then we got the babies to choose between these two puppets. That is, they had to choose between a puppet who rewarded a good guy versus a puppet who punished a good guy. Likewise, we showed them a character who acted as a hinderer (for example, keeping a puppet from opening a box) and then had them choose between a puppet who rewarded the bad guy versus one who punished the bad guy.

The results were striking. When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires. But this shouldn’t strike you as an altogether alien experience: while we adults possess the additional critical capacity of being able to consciously reason about morality, we’re not otherwise that different from babies — our moral feelings are often instinctive. In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.

Is This the Morality We’re Looking For?
What do these findings about babies’ moral notions tell us about adult morality? Some scholars think that the very existence of an innate moral sense has profound implications. In 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin discovered natural selection, wrote that certain human capacities — including “the higher moral faculties” — are richer than what you could expect from a product of biological evolution. He concluded that some sort of godly force must intervene to create these capacities. (Darwin was horrified at this suggestion, writing to Wallace, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”)

A few years ago, in his book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” the social and cultural critic Dinesh D’Souza revived this argument. He conceded that evolution can explain our niceness in instances like kindness to kin, where the niceness has a clear genetic payoff, but he drew the line at “high altruism,” acts of entirely disinterested kindness. For D’Souza, “there is no Darwinian rationale” for why you would give up your seat for an old lady on a bus, an act of nice-guyness that does nothing for your genes. And what about those who donate blood to strangers or sacrifice their lives for a worthy cause? D’Souza reasoned that these stirrings of conscience are best explained not by evolution or psychology but by “the voice of God within our souls.”

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The Moral Life of Babies (5)

Paul Bloom

is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

In one of our first studies of moral evaluation, we decided not to use two-dimensional animated movies but rather a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow square would help the circle up the hill; a red triangle would push it down. After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we opted to record not the babies’ looking time but rather which character they reached for, on the theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what a baby wants. In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy.

(Experimental minutiae: What if babies simply like the color red or prefer squares or something like that? To control for this, half the babies got the yellow square as the helper; half got it as the hinderer. What about problems of unconscious cueing and unconscious bias? To avoid this, at the moment when the two characters were offered on the tray, the parent had his or her eyes closed, and the experimenter holding out the characters and recording the responses hadn’t seen the puppet show, so he or she didn’t know who was the good guy and who the bad guy.)

One question that arose with these experiments was how to understand the babies’ preference: did they act as they did because they were attracted to the helpful individual or because they were repelled by the hinderer or was it both? We explored this question in a further series of studies that introduced a neutral character, one that neither helps nor hinders. We found that, given a choice, infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one; and prefer a neutral character to one who hinders. This finding indicates that both inclinations are at work — babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.

Does our research show that babies believe that the helpful character is good and the hindering character is bad? Not necessarily. All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean. When we showed these scenes to much older kids — 18-month-olds — and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as adults would, identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.

To increase our confidence that the babies we studied were really responding to niceness and naughtiness, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin, in a separate series of studies, created different sets of one-act morality plays to show the babies. In one, an individual struggled to open a box; the lid would be partly opened but then fall back down. Then, on alternating trials, one puppet would grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut. In another study (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article), a puppet would play with a ball. The puppet would roll the ball to another puppet, who would roll it back, and the first puppet would roll the ball to a different puppet who would run away with it. In both studies, 5-month-olds preferred the good guy — the one who helped to open the box; the one who rolled the ball back — to the bad guy. This all suggests that the babies we studied have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of actions.

A further question that arises is whether babies possess more subtle moral capacities than preferring good and avoiding bad. Part and parcel of adult morality, for instance, is the idea that good acts should meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative response — justice demands the good be rewarded and the bad punished. For our next studies, we turned our attention back to the older babies and toddlers and tried to explore whether the preferences that we were finding had anything to do with moral judgment in this mature sense. In collaboration with Neha Mahajan, a psychology graduate student at Yale, Hamlin, Wynn and I exposed 21-month-olds to the good guy/bad guy situations described above, and we gave them the opportunity to reward or punish either by giving a treat to, or taking a treat from, one of the characters. We found that when asked to give, they tended to chose the positive character; when asked to take, they tended to choose the negative one.

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The Moral Life of Babies (4)

Paul Bloom

is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense — like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task. The psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have put toddlers in situations in which an adult is struggling to get something done, like opening a cabinet door with his hands full or trying to get to an object out of reach. The toddlers tend to spontaneously help, even without any prompting, encouragement or reward.

Is any of the above behavior recognizable as moral conduct? Not obviously so. Moral ideas seem to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality — if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. (Even a 4-year-old knows not only that unprovoked hitting is wrong but also that it would continue to be wrong even if a teacher said that it was O.K.) And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.

Babies and toddlers might not know or exhibit any of these moral subtleties. Their sympathetic reactions and motivations — including their desire to alleviate the pain of others — may not be much different in kind from purely nonmoral reactions and motivations like growing hungry or wanting to void a full bladder. Even if that is true, though, it is hard to conceive of a moral system that didn’t have, as a starting point, these empathetic capacities. As David Hume argued, mere rationality can’t be the foundation of morality, since our most basic desires are neither rational nor irrational. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason,” he wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To have a genuinely moral system, in other words, some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.

Moral-Baby Experiments
So what do babies really understand about morality? Our first experiments exploring this question were done in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher named Valerie Kuhlmeier (who is now an associate professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Ontario). Building on previous work by the psychologists David and Ann Premack, we began by investigating what babies think about two particular kinds of action: helping and hindering.

Our experiments involved having children watch animated movies of geometrical characters with faces. In one, a red ball would try to go up a hill. On some attempts, a yellow square got behind the ball and gently nudged it upward; in others, a green triangle got in front of it and pushed it down. We were interested in babies’ expectations about the ball’s attitudes — what would the baby expect the ball to make of the character who helped it and the one who hindered it? To find out, we then showed the babies additional movies in which the ball either approached the square or the triangle. When the ball approached the triangle (the hinderer), both 9- and 12-month-olds looked longer than they did when the ball approached the square (the helper). This was consistent with the interpretation that the former action surprised them; they expected the ball to approach the helper. A later study, using somewhat different stimuli, replicated the finding with 10-month-olds, but found that 6-month-olds seem to have no expectations at all. (This effect is robust only when the animated characters have faces; when they are simple faceless figures, it is apparently harder for babies to interpret what they are seeing as a social interaction.)

This experiment was designed to explore babies’ expectations about social interactions, not their moral capacities per se. But if you look at the movies, it’s clear that, at least to adult eyes, there is some latent moral content to the situation: the triangle is kind of a jerk; the square is a sweetheart. So we set out to investigate whether babies make the same judgments about the characters that adults do. Forget about how babies expect the ball to act toward the other characters; what do babies themselves think about the square and the triangle? Do they prefer the good guy and dislike the bad guy?

Here we began our more focused investigations into baby morality. For these studies, parents took their babies to the Infant Cognition Center, which is within one of the Yale psychology buildings. (The center is just a couple of blocks away from where Stanley Milgram did his famous experiments on obedience in the early 1960s, tricking New Haven residents into believing that they had severely harmed or even killed strangers with electrical shocks.) The parents were told about what was going to happen and filled out consent forms, which described the study, the risks to the baby (minimal) and the benefits to the baby (minimal, though it is a nice-enough experience). Parents often asked, reasonably enough, if they would learn how their baby does, and the answer was no. This sort of study provides no clinical or educational feedback about individual babies; the findings make sense only when computed as a group.

For the experiment proper, a parent will carry his or her baby into a small testing room. A typical experiment takes about 15 minutes. Usually, the parent sits on a chair, with the baby on his or her lap, though for some studies, the baby is strapped into a high chair with the parent standing behind. At this point, some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; there will then be a short break for the baby to wake up or calm down, but on average this kind of study ends up losing about a quarter of the subjects. Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants to make some extra money or needs to fulfill an Intro Psych requirement, there’s some truth to the claim that this developmental work is a science of the interested and alert baby.

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The Moral Life of Babies (3)

Paul Bloom

is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

These discoveries inevitably raise a question: If babies have such a rich understanding of objects and people so early in life, why do they seem so ignorant and helpless? Why don’t they put their knowledge to more active use? One possible answer is that these capacities are the psychological equivalent of physical traits like testicles or ovaries, which are formed in infancy and then sit around, useless, for years and years. Another possibility is that babies do, in fact, use their knowledge from Day 1, not for action but for learning. One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make. Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter.

Nice Babies
Psychologists like myself who are interested in the cognitive capacities of babies and toddlers are now turning our attention to whether babies have a “naïve morality.” But there is reason to proceed with caution. Morality, after all, is a different sort of affair than physics or psychology. The truths of physics and psychology are universal: objects obey the same physical laws everywhere; and people everywhere have minds, goals, desires and beliefs. But the existence of a universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide variation from society to society.

In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works, at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.

In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they seem closely related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others. In his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin, a keen observer of human nature, tells the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing sympathy at a very young age: “When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.”

There seems to be something evolutionarily ancient to this empathetic response. If you want to cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all. (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)

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The Moral Life of Babies (2)

Paul Bloom
is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

A reason this view has persisted is that, for many years, scientists weren’t sure how to go about studying the mental life of babies. It’s a challenge to study the cognitive abilities of any creature that lacks language, but human babies present an additional difficulty, because, even compared to rats or birds, they are behaviorally limited: they can’t run mazes or peck at levers. In the 1980s, however, psychologists interested in exploring how much babies know began making use of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes. The eyes are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing. You can use “looking time,” then, as a rough but reliable proxy for what captures babies’ attention: what babies are surprised by or what babies like.

The studies in the 1980s that made use of this methodology were able to discover surprising things about what babies know about the nature and workings of physical objects — a baby’s “naïve physics.” Psychologists — most notably Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon — conducted studies that essentially involved showing babies magic tricks, events that seemed to violate some law of the universe: you remove the supports from beneath a block and it floats in midair, unsupported; an object disappears and then reappears in another location; a box is placed behind a screen, the screen falls backward into empty space. Like adults, babies tend to linger on such scenes — they look longer at them than at scenes that are identical in all regards except that they don’t violate physical laws. This suggests that babies have expectations about how objects should behave. A vast body of research now suggests that — contrary to what was taught for decades to legions of psychology undergraduates — babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time.

Other studies, starting with a 1992 paper by my wife, Karen, have found that babies can do rudimentary math with objects. The demonstration is simple. Show a baby an empty stage. Raise a screen to obscure part of the stage. In view of the baby, put a Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Then put another Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Now drop the screen. Adults expect two dolls — and so do 5-month-olds: if the screen drops to reveal one or three dolls, the babies look longer, in surprise, than they do if the screen drops to reveal two.

A second wave of studies used looking-time methods to explore what babies know about the minds of others — a baby’s “naïve psychology.” Psychologists had known for a while that even the youngest of babies treat people different from inanimate objects. Babies like to look at faces; they mimic them, they smile at them. They expect engagement: if a moving object becomes still, they merely lose interest; if a person’s face becomes still, however, they become distressed.

But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: babies show surprise when someone takes a roundabout path to something he wants. They expect someone who reaches for an object to reach for the same object later, even if its location has changed. And well before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false beliefs. The psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon have found that 15-month-olds expect that if a person sees an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box when the person isn’t looking, the person will later reach into the box where he first saw the object, not the box where it actually is. That is, toddlers have a mental model not merely of the world but of the world as understood by someone else.

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The Moral Life of Babies (1)

Paul Bloom
is a professor of psychology at Yale. His new book, “How Pleasure Works”

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

Smart Babies
Babies seem spastic in their actions, undisciplined in their attention. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot,” and in 1890 William James famously described a baby’s mental life as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves. Many developmental psychologists will tell you that the ignorance of human babies extends well into childhood. For many years the conventional view was that young humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world (like that objects continue to exist once they are out of sight) and basic facts about people (like that they have beliefs and desires and goals) — let alone how long it takes them to learn about morality.

I am admittedly biased, but I think one of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken.

Next to The Moral Life of Babies (2)

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Time to Review Workplace Reviews?

By
TARA PARKER-POPE

After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies — they have identified some surprising ones.

The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.

A number of studies have documented the health toll of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.

Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.

“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker.

“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”

Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”

Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.

“If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.”

And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.

Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor.

The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions.

But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.

“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com

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An Addiction Expert Reveals a Drug Habit

By TARA PARKER-POPE

In this week’s “A Piece of My Mind” column in The Journal of the American Medical Association, a specialist in addiction offers a riveting tale of his own tragic drug habit.

Clinton B. McCracken of Baltimore is a biomedical scientist who built a career exploring the neuroscience of addiction. He writes that his experience serves as a cautionary tale for highly educated professionals, particularly health care workers, who may “intellectualize their drug use.” As he explains, their own intelligence and expertise about addiction leads them to overestimate their ability to stay in control of a drug habit.

Dr. McCracken confesses to a daily, decade-long marijuana habit and three years of abusing opioids injected intravenously. But because of his extensive knowledge of addiction, he was able to convince himself that his drug use was not a risk. He continued to function at a high level at work and in his personal life.

But then tragedy struck. His fiancée lost her life after injecting a contaminated drug, which resulted in a severe allergic reaction.

While waiting for the paramedics to arrive I tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her. Despite heroic efforts, neither the paramedics nor the emergency department physicians were able to revive her. As a consequence of her death, our house was searched by police, who then discovered the ongoing marijuana cultivation. I was immediately arrested, jailed, and charged with a number of felonies; then, in the space of a few days, my employment as a postdoctoral fellow was summarily terminated and I was evicted from my residence.

In addition to losing the woman he loved, Dr. McCracken faced jail time and an uncertain future.

Reputation is critical in my field, and mine is likely to be damaged for the foreseeable future….I have now been convicted of a felony, which will undoubtedly have a severely negative effect on any future job prospects and international travel. Finally, as a Canadian citizen, my ability to live in, work in, and even visit the United States, my home for the last ten years, is also compromised; I face imminent deportation with almost no hope of reentry in the future.

The transition from my drug use having no apparent negative consequences, to both my personal and professional life being damaged possibly beyond repair, was so fast as to be instantaneous, highlighting the fact that when it comes to drug use, the perception of control is really nothing more than illusion.

The essay, “Intellectualization of Drug Abuse,” is at The Journal of the American Medical Association Web site, although the full article requires a subscription.

Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com

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Can an Enemy Be a Child’s Friend?

In sixth grade they were unlikely friends, the good kid and the bad one, the girl who studied and the one who smoked in the alley. They hung out; they met for lunch. They even walked home from school together, one watching, awestruck, while the other ducked into drugstores to shoplift lip gloss, cigarettes, candy.

It couldn’t last. One morning in seventh grade, a nasty note appeared on the tough girl’s locker — and someone told her the writer was her cautious friend.

“I would never, ever have done that,” said the friend, Bonnie Shapiro, 45, now a mother of two in Evanston, Ill., who works as a recruiter for a design agency. “But it didn’t matter.”

Brushing aside Bonnie’s denials, the tough girl told her she was in for it. Sure enough, after school “she and her friends were outside waiting for me, and I had no one, no gang, no one there to support me,” Ms. Shapiro recalled.

“I remember it all clearly — I remember what I was wearing: a yellow slicker, with a pink lining.”

Admiration turned quickly to fear. “She became that person for me,” Ms. Shapiro said, “and you just don’t forget.”

Almost everyone picks up a tormentor or two while growing up, and until lately psychological researchers have ignored such relationships — assuming them to be little more than the opposite of friendship.

Yet new research suggests that as threatening as they may feel, antagonistic relationships can often enhance social and emotional development more than they impede it. The relationships are not all made equal — a classroom rival is one thing, a hostile ex-friend another — and researchers say their psychological impact depends in part on how youngsters respond.

“Friendships provide a context in which children develop, but of course so do negative peer relations,” said Maurissa Abecassis, a psychologist at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. “We should expect that both types of relationships, as different as they are, present opportunities for growth.” Of course nobody would claim that hostile relationships are invariably healthy. The evidence that they can inflict more than flesh wounds is writ large and small (sometimes with accompanying photos) on social networking sites, as well as in schoolyard baiting and bullying.

So far this year, at least two teenage girls have committed suicide after repeatedly being attacked and insulted by a group of classmates. Being the target of a clique, or having a string of enemies, is especially treacherous, researchers say. And while suicide remains rare, antagonism is pervasive: studies have found that 15 to 40 percent of elementary schoolchildren have been involved in at least one such relationship — and that the rate in middle school and high school, where exclusion and gossip run highest, ranges from 48 to 70 percent.

Yet psychologists have found shortcomings in this early work. For one thing, most children (and adults) who have had rivals, antagonists or enemies are doing fine, thanks. For another, the results have been warped by a phenomenon called peer rejection: a small group of children are so different from their peers that they suffer far more than their share of bullying.

In a review of these types of studies in the current issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, Noel A. Card, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, corrected the combined results for peer rejection. “Once you factor out peer rejection,”” he said in an interview,, “the effects of antipathetic relationships on adjustment are pretty slight.”

This will come as small comfort to children and adolescents in the trenches, who may be swimming in foul text messages, threats or humiliating gossip. The sting is especially deep when good friends turn against one another.

In an earlier study, titled “We Were Friends, but ...,” Dr. Card found that soured friendships were a common, and particularly intense, form of mutual antagonism. One participant described what happened after a friend left her at a party, going home with someone else without saying anything: “The next day I confronted her, and we got into a fight and suspended from school. That’s when she started spreading rumors.”

Ms. Shapiro’s fight with her former friend was partly for show. The stronger girl pretended to hit her — and told her to run away holding her face, for the benefit of the other tough kids watching. It was terrifying nonetheless. “I ran all the way home,” she said. “All through high school I was scared of her, and we didn’t talk. I just avoided her.”

Source: Nytimes.com

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The importance of leading responsibly

Jack Denfeld Wood
is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD (www.imd.ch)
and the director of its Building on Talent program.

Ask people to name great leaders and chances are that they will choose a person who “fought to improve the state of the world” in one way or another; Gandhi, perhaps, or Winston Churchill. They will also name – more provocatively but just as accurately – someone such as Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden.

This means that any serious examination of what it means to be a leader must include the recognition that one can be responsible for causing great harm as well as great good.

The responsible exercise of leadership is not the result of putting someone in a particular job, investing him or her with formal authority, and giving them a book of ethical rules to follow. It doesn’t work that way—witness the origins of the current world financial disarray.

Neither is selecting those for leadership positions the result of an assessment of a range of specific traits, competences, or presumed abilities, no matter how much some recruiters would like to believe this. Nor do those installed in leadership positions rationally assess the situation that they are facing and then choose a particular leadership style and course of action, as many theorists suggest.

The heart of leadership is not rational — it is deeply psychological and emotional. In fact, I do not believe that it is possible to “teach” leadership in the way that other subjects are taught—through lecture, videos, and written examinations.

You are just as likely to improve your capacity to exercise leadership from reading books and watching podcasts by management gurus as you are to likely to improve your physical condition by watching fitness videos and Olympic competitions.

But if leadership can not be taught, it can be learnt. Given the right conditions, virtually anyone can develop their capacity to lead more effectively. But leadership takes work. Anyone who wants to run a marathon in under three hours has to spend months practicing. Just so — executives who wants to develop their capacity to lead must get their hands dirty and actually “do” leadership.

Leadership has never been about simply following orders, however, and whether those who are developing their capacity to exercise leadership do so in a responsible way depends on how they understand and integrate their responsibilities as a leader.

Leadership is neither inherently good nor evil, but is a process that can be used in the pursuit of either. Indeed, the positive traits that make great leaders also contain elements with a far darker, shadow side.

The implications are clear: Leadership must be exercised responsibly if it is to be beneficial; and leadership development must include the development of a finer moral and ethical compass and increased self-awareness.

This is a central reason why IMD revamped its flagship high potential Building on Talent program (BOT) — to give young up-and-coming managers practice in three fundamental elements of effective management — hands-on leadership development through a deeper grasp of business fundamentals, an integrative personal project, and the opportunity to understand the broader moral context in which they live and work.

The Responsible Leadership Elective (RLE) of the BOT program requires young executives — IMD BOT Fellows — to collaborate with a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the developing world and to use their technical strategic and business knowledge and skills to “make a difference”. The Elective gets them out of the business class lounge, away from the boardroom at corporate HQ, and into situations where issues other than quarterly returns and shareholder value have to be dealt with — often life and death issues. BOT participants can choose, for example, to help Cambodian parents learn business and technical skills that will allow them to earn enough money to send their children to school, work with Vietnamese children to develop their “hospitality” skills to land jobs with hotels and restaurants, to develop a reward system that will help a Tanzanian rehabilitation facility retain its medical personnel, or to work with the legal systems in the Middle East to ensure fair treatment of prisoners.

It is important that individuals exercising leadership in the future see and work with organizations with this broader sort of aim because otherwise they risk being captured by the short-term goals that dominate many profit-driven businesses. Such lack of awareness inevitably affects thousands, or even millions, of people.

Without this external awareness managers can, in effect, become hostage to the limited organizational vision. With the RLE, new factors are brought into the decision-making calculus leading to better, longer-term, more responsible and sustainable choices.

Profit at any price is not good enough. Companies that profit responsibly will last — and so will the societies on which that profit rests. Organizations — private or public sector — that do not behave responsibly will fail in due course. Every group or organization needs the exercise of leadership; but only those with a long-term vision of responsible leadership will exercise it wisely. Ultimately, executives must strive to do both.

Leadership is neither inherently good nor evil, but is a process that can be used in the pursuit of either.

Source: The Jakarta Post

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THE MASCULINITY OF MONEY: AUTOMATIC STEREOTYPES PREDICT GENDER DIFFERENCES IN ESTIMATED SALARIES

Melissa J. Williams 1 Elizabeth Levy Paluck 2 Julie Spencer-Rodgers 3
1 Stanford University
2 Princeton University
3 University of California, Santa Barbara

Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Melissa J. Williams, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: mjwilliams@stanford.edu

Melissa J. Williams, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Department of Psychology, Princeton University; Julie Spencer-Rodgers, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California and the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship Program. Previous versions of this research were awarded the Annual Prize for Student Research from the Association for Women in Psychology/Society for the Psychology of Women and a Graduate Student Poster Award at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Also, we thank Cris Arellano, Leslie Arimas, Rochelle Smith Burnaford, Wendy Chu, Skye Fraser, Natalia Garcia, Meena Kim, Anna Rubin, Julie Shah, Xi Sheng, and Melanie Sun for invaluable assistance with data collection.

Copyright ©2010 Division 35, American Psychological Association

Abstract

We present the first empirical investigation of why men are assumed to earn higher salaries than women (the salary estimation effect). Although this phenomenon is typically attributed to conscious consideration of the national wage gap (i.e., real inequities in salary), we hypothesize instead that it reflects differential, automatic economic valuing of men and women. In the four studies described here, we demonstrate that the salary estimation effect is present in both student and community samples, is not explained by participants' awareness of real gender inequities in pay, and appears in descriptive tasks (i.e., estimating what men and women do earn; Studies 1 and 2) as well as in a prescriptive task (i.e., determining what men and women should earn; Study 3). Further, the salary estimation effect is best predicted by the degree to which participants hold an automatic stereotype that links men, more than women, with wealth (Study 4). These results suggest that differential estimates of men's and women's salaries, rather than deliberately reflecting reality, instead indicate a male-wealth stereotype that operates largely outside of awareness. We discuss the implications of these results for salary decision making and the unintentional perpetuation of the gender gap in wages.

Next: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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How to Become a More Effective Learner Tips from Psychology to Improve Learning Effectiveness & Efficiency

By Kendra Cherry

I'm always interested in finding new ways to learn better and faster. As a graduate student who is also a full-time science writer, the amount of time I have to spend learning new things is limited. It's important to get the most educational value out of my time as possible. However, retention, recall and transfer are also critical. I need to be able to accurately remember the information I learn, recall it at a later time and utilize it effectively in a wide variety of situations.

1. Memory Improvement Basics
I've written before about some of the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips such as improving focus, avoiding cram sessions and structuring your study time are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.

2. Keep Learning (and Practicing) New Things


"Learning is good for your brain. "Learning and practicing new skills helps your brain retain new information. Image by Mysid.

One sure-fire way to become a more effective learner is to simply keep learning. A 2004 Nature article reported that people who learned how to juggle increased the amount of gray matter in their occipital lobes, the area of the brain is associated with visual memory.1 When these individuals stopped practicing their new skill, this gray matter vanished.

So if you're learning a new language, it is important to keep practicing the language in order to maintain the gains you have achieved. This "use-it-or-lose-it" phenomenon involves a brain process known as "pruning." Certain pathways in the brain are maintained, while other are eliminated. If you want the new information you just learned to stay put, keep practicing and rehearsing it.

3. Learn in Multiple Ways
Focus on learning in more than one way. Instead of just listening to a podcast, which involves auditory learning, find a way to rehearse the information both verbally and visually. This might involve describing what you learned to a friend, taking notes or drawing a mind map. By learning in more than one way, you’re further cementing the knowledge in your mind. According to Judy Willis, “The more regions of the brain that store data about a subject, the more interconnection there is. This redundancy means students will have more opportunities to pull up all of those related bits of data from their multiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross-referencing of data means we have learned, rather than just memorized.”2

4. Teach What You've Learned to Another Person
Educators have long noted that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Remember your seventh-grade presentation on Costa Rica? By teaching to the rest of the class, your teacher hoped you would gain even more from the assignment. You can apply the same principle today by sharing your newly learned skills and knowledge with others.

Start by translating the information into your own words. This process alone helps solidify new knowledge in your brain. Next, find some way to share what you’ve learned. Some ideas include writing a blog post, creating a podcast or participating in a group discussion.

5. Utilize Previous Learning to Promote New Learning
Another great way to become a more effective learner is to use relational learning, which involves relating new information to things that you already know. For example, if you are learning about Romeo and Juliet, you might associate what you learn about the play with prior knowledge you have about Shakespeare, the historical period in which the author lived and other relevant information.

6. Gain Practical Experience
For many of us, learning typically involves reading textbooks, attending lectures or doing research in the library or on the Web. While seeing information and then writing it down is important, actually putting new knowledge and skills into practice can be one of the best ways to improve learning. If you are trying to acquire a new skill or ability, focus on gaining practical experience. If it is a sport or athletic skill, perform the activity on a regular basis. If you are learning a new language, practice speaking with another person and surround yourself with immersive experiences.

7. Look Up Answers Rather Than Struggle to Remember
Of course, learning isn’t a perfect process. Sometimes, we forget the details of things that we have already learned. If you find yourself struggling to recall some tidbit of information, research suggests that you are better offer simply looking up the correct answer. One study found that the longer you spend trying to remember the answer, the more likely you will be to forget the answer again in the future. Why? Because these attempts to recall previously learned information actually results in learning the "error state" instead of the correct response.

8. Understand How You Learn Best
Another great strategy for improving your learning efficiency is to recognize your learning habits and styles. There are a number of different theories about learning styles, which can all help you gain a better understanding of how you learn best. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences describes eight different types of intelligence that can help reveal your individual strengths. Looking at Carl Jung’s learning style dimensions can also help you better see which learning strategies might work best for you.

9. Use Testing to Boost Learning
While it may seem that spending more time studying is one of the best ways to maximize learning, research has demonstrated that taking tests actually helps you better remember what you've learned, even if it wasn't covered on the test.3 The study revealed that students who studied and were then tested had better long-term recall of the materials, even on information that was not covered by the tests. Students who had extra time to study but were not tested had significantly lower recall of the materials.

10. Stop Multitasking
For many years, it was thought that people who multitask, or perform more than one activity at once, had an edge over those who did not. However, research now suggests that multitasking can actually make learning less effective. In the study, participants lost significant amounts of time as they switched between multiple tasks and lost even more time as the tasks became increasingly complex.4 By switching from one activity to another, you will learn more slowly, become less efficient and make more errors. How can you avoid the dangers of multitasking? Start by focusing your attention on the task at hand and continue working for a predetermined amount of time.

11. References

1 Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., & Schuierer, G. (2004). Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427(22), 311-312.

2 Willis, J. (2008). Brain-based teaching strategies for improving students' memory, learning, and test-taking success.(Review of Research). Childhood Education, 83(5), 31-316.

3 Chan, J.C., McDermott, K.B., & Roediger, H.L. (2007). Retrieval-induced facilitation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135(4), 553-571.

4 Rubinstein, Joshua S.; Meyer, David E.; Evans, Jeffrey E. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797.

Source: psychology.about.com

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The temporal relation between depression and comorbid psychopathology in adolescents at varied risk for depression

By

Catherine M. Gallerani, Judy Garber, and Nina C. Martin
Vanderbilt University, USA

Background:
This study examined the temporal comorbidity of depressive disorders with anxiety, externalizing, and substance use disorders in adolescents who varied in risk for depression.

Methods:
Participants were 240 adolescents and their mothers who had either a history of depression (high-risk, n = 185) or were lifetime-free of psychiatric disorders (low-risk, n = 55). Children (54.2% females) were first evaluated in 6th grade (mean age = 11.86, SD = .57) with the K-SADS-PL to assess current and lifetime diagnoses, and then annually through 12th grade with the A-LIFE to assess diagnoses since the previous evaluation.

Results:
For girls, the rate of depression was high regardless of prior anxiety, whereas for boys, the odds that those with prior subthreshold anxiety would have subsequent subthreshold depression were 1.5 times those of boys with no prior subthreshold anxiety, controlling for risk. In addition, the odds that girls with prior substance use disorders would have a threshold depressive disorder subsequently were three times those of girls with no prior substance use disorders, controlling for risk.

Conclusions:
These results highlight the importance of early detection of various forms of psychopathology in youth who then can be targeted for intervention. The prospective paths to comorbidity differed by sex, thus suggesting that interventions need to be constructed with sensitivity to these distinct diagnostic trajectories.

Keywords: Depression, comorbidity, adolescents, high-risk offspring.

Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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Deficits in interval timing measured by the dual-task paradigm among children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Shoou-Lian Hwang,1,2 Susan Shur-Fen Gau,3,4 Wen-Yau Hsu,1,5 and Yu-Yu Wu6
1. Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan;
2. Department of Applied Psychology, Hsuan Chuang University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;
3. Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan;
4. Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan;
5. Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan;
6. Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Chang Gung University College of Medicine, Tao-Yuan, Taiwan

Background:
The underlying mechanism of time perception deficit in long time intervals in attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is still unclear. This study used the time reproduction dual task to explore the role of the attentional resource in time perception deficits among children and adolescents with ADHD.

Methods:
Participants included 168 children and adolescents with DSM-IV ADHD and 90 control children and adolescents without ADHD, aged 10 to 17 years, in Taipei. The DSM-IV diagnoses of ADHD and other psychiatric comorbid conditions were made by clinical assessments and confirmed by the psychiatric interviews of both parents and participants using the Chinese Kiddie Epidemiologic version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia. The participants were also assessed by using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-3rd edition (WISC-III), and time reproduction tasks (the single task and the simple and difficult versions of the dual tasks) at 5-second, 12-second, and 17-second intervals. The linear mixed model was used for data analysis.

Results:
Children and adolescents with ADHD had less precise time reproduction than the controls in all three tasks except the 5-second interval of the single task. There were significant interactions between group and interval (12-second vs. 5-second, p = .030; 17-second vs. 5-second, p < .001), and between group and task (simple dual task vs. single task, p = .016; difficult dual task vs. single task, p < .001) after controlling for FSIQ, comorbidity, sex, age, use of methylphenidate, and the performance of the non-temporal tasks in dual tasks, if relevant.

Conclusions:
Significantly increased estimation errors in ADHD with increased task difficulties suggest that impaired timing processing in children and adolescents with ADHD during long time intervals may be accounted for by the limited attentional capacity rather than a primary problem in timing per se. This finding does not apply to rapid time intervals, in which cerebellar circuitry is important.

Keywords: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, time reproduction, dual task, attentional resource.

Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

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Family Therapy And Muslim Families : A Solution Focused Approach

By
Wahida C.Valiante BSW, MSW, OASW

INTRODUCTION
Over the years, family therapy has emerged as a separate and distinct discipline, one practiced very often by those outside the formal fields of psychiatry and psychology -- such as social workers, family therapists, counselors, and others. This diversity of practitioners illustrates well that there is no universal theory of psychotherapy. Many different approaches, techniques and theories seem to produce positive changes and results. Psychotherapy itself has also gone through several changes, from Freud’s “unconscious and deficit focus” to behavioral and cognitive therapies in the “here and now.” Currently it is moving toward “future orientation” with a primary focus on individual strengths, knowledge, abilities and the potential for change. The individual is neither stuck in the past, nor the present, but is looking also to the future.
Based on the writer’s own clinical experience, and without excluding other family therapy models, this presentation points to striking links between certain Qur’anic concepts and Solution Focused Therapy, which suggests that the latter may be especially applicable to treating post traumatic stress disorder in members of this particular cultural and religious minority.

RATIONALE
Demographics:
-There are approximately 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.
-Millions of Muslims live in North America and Europe; 6 to 7 million in the U.S. and 650,000 in Canada (May 2003 statistics)
The United States has the highest divorce rate worldwide (48.6 percent)
The United Kingdom has the second-highest divorce rate (36 percent)
Muslims in North America have the third-highest divorce rate at 33 percent (source: New York-based Muslim sociologist Ilyas Ba-Yunus)
There are large numbers of Muslim refugees from war-torn nations who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological and physical traumas, rape-induced traumas, and other varieties of serious loss
There is an urgent need for an alternative Family Therapy, practiced from the Islamic perspective

Study of the Muslim Family:
There is a paucity of written and researched material by Muslim scholars and scientists on the family, as viewed from historical, socio-cultural, psychological, behavioral, and political perspectives. AbuSulayman (1993) points out that most Muslim scholarship on family and gender relationships is restricted by and confined to the formative years of Islamic law, “that is, to the first four centuries or so of Islamic history (roughly from the seventh to the eleventh century).” This is also the period during which Islamic Law (or Sharia) developed, and when Muslim society reached the zenith of its political, social, legal and economic maturity.
The end of this period marked the culmination of a religious-legal process to which nothing of major moment has since been added. Unfortunately, this is also the period that culminated in stifling any further development of intellectual, social, philosophical and legal thought by Muslim minds in light of the faith's revealed text, the Holy Qur’an.
It is important to note that most classical and contemporary Muslim scholars have studied families only from a religious point of view. According to this approach, the family is viewed exclusively from a religious perspective, which is held up as both normative and idealized. This normative view of family, however, presents a version of sociological and ideological reality that is at odds with the actual state of the family (i.e., not “what it should be”) in most of Muslim society.
This creates insurmountable difficulties in critically examining the validity of the patriarchal structure, the role and status of women, and the concept of equality in light of current Qur’anic knowledge and of the Prophet Muhammad's own family practices. For centuries, Muslims all over the world have been superimposing on their faith laws that were developed in response to local cultural, social, political, or legal needs. But many of those cultural and indigenous practices, or legal traditions, have serious implications for the Muslim family in general and Muslim women in particular, who are caught between the opposing worldviews; the Qur’an and the other
One of the most compelling arguments against this classical body of Muslim knowledge is that it restricts the worldview of the Qur’an itself to certain socio-cultural, behavioral, and historical time-space factors. Furthermore, it limits family study to idealized versions instead of existing reality, and avoids seeking solutions to correct the existing situation.

Brief Solution Focused Therapy:
For most of its history, Psychotherapy has focused on identifying and eliminating the problems presented by individual pathologies and deficiencies. There is, however, an emerging trend or focus shift, from pathology and deficit toward developing personal strengths, competence, capabilities, and resources through therapy. It is a way of thinking that projects visions of what might be, and what should be, thereby helping people in therapy see the potential for change that generates solutions and actions that otherwise might not have materialized.

Relating Qur’anic concepts to aspects of Brief Solution Focused Therapy:
The Qur’an presents itself as a “guide” from the One Creator of all things to humanity, through a representative of Allah (Qur’an 6:165), who is the trustee of free will (Qur’an 18:20), and who is under moral obligation to change him/herself and society to create a just and morally balanced world (Qur’an 3:110). The purpose of the Qur’an is not to be rigid and dogmatic, but to guide humanity to find solutions to heal the whole person -- body, mind and soul -- as part of social reality. It is focused on applying solutions through action, rather than blindly following spiritual precepts alone.
In the Qur’an, the individual is defined in a unique way. One is responsible for his/her own actions; “ But proclaim (to them) this (truth): That every soul delivers itself to ruin by its own act.”(Qur’an 6:70). Personal responsibility is also tied to relationships -- those of kinship, masakin (the needy), orphans, even wayfarers, as well as with one's community, society at large, and ultimately with the world.
Similarly, an ethical or spiritual action, whether positive or negative, is bound to have an impact on oneself, others, society, community, and the world. Herein lie some ideas that illustrate ready parallels with Solution Focused Psychotherapy, with its concepts of solutions, including: action, free will, the ability to make choices, responsibility for one's own action and behavior, individual responsibility, and the ability to change (jihad) oneself and society. Through constant growth, gender-neutral interconnectedness, small changes, and small goals, human nature is basically healthy and strong, and miracles do happen.

ANALYSIS:
Emphasis on Individual Behavior and Strengths, Rather than Past History:
The focus of reform in the Qur’an is the individual, who is not only an integral part of his/her family, society, community, and the global congregation (or Ummah) of Islam, but is also the recipient of the best physical form and temperament (fitra); “Surely, We have created human beings in the best of molds” (Qur’an 95:4). In addition to free will, human beings are also given the faculties of hearing, seeing, feeling, and understanding, in order to make evaluative judgments between right and wrong (Qur’an 67:23).
Therefore, personal choice and responsibility for individual behavior is central to Islamic thinking; “…every soul draws the consequences of its own action.” (Qur’an 16:111). In fact, there is a constantly renewed opportunity for choice between right and wrong actions, so that past behavior is only relevant insofar as it acts as a strong predictor of current and future behavior. Working with individual strengths and current behavior, with only selective references to the individual's past history, corresponds to the approach of Solution Focused Therapy.

Emphasis upon Action, Rather than on understanding the Pathology or the Problem:
“…Surely Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition…”(Qur’an 13:11). The precedence of action over understanding the background pathology or problem is a central Islamic concept. The Qur’an states that human beings are created to be representatives (vicegerents) of Allah (Qur’an 6:165) and are under a moral obligation to continually reflect and reform them selves (Qur’an 3:110). Thus, according to the Qur’an, one's successes in this life and in the Hereafter are measured not solely in terms of personal inter-psychic growth, but in terms of personal growth as shown in relationship to others and to God.
The Qur’an reminds us that change does not come about by ritualistic pursuits only, since reward and punishment are considered more immediately in relation to one's actions, rather than to one's professed faith. Bearing this in mind, Islam declares action to be a necessary concomitant of faith. In popular terms, Islam always seeks to "walk the talk." Similarly, the approach of Solution Focused Family Therapy is also more concerned with action than with retrospective insight. It aims to change the individual's behavior in order to alter his/her conditions of living rather than their attitudes to it; that is, from saying “I do not know what to do,” to “what can I do to change things?”

Emphasis on the Individual rather than Gender:
A further point of strong contact between Qur’anic teachings and Brief Solution Focused Therapy is the notion of individuality; that is, each individual has the ultimate responsibility of helping himself or herself, and therefore carries the personal responsibility of discerning free will and actions, and of seeking solutions and setting goals that will not be impaired because of gender. Above all, solution focused therapists do not assume "deficiency" in their female clients.
In the Qur’an, the creation of man and woman out of a single soul (Qur’an 4:1) does not distinguish between men and women along the lines of traditional male or female attributes. Nor does it divide human nature and divine nature according to gender, or assign any specific cultural functions or roles to either men or women. In fact, there is no arbitrary pre-ordained eternal system of hierarchy.
The Qur’an treats women as individuals in the same manner as it treats men as individuals. This Qur’anic individuality is distinguished on the basis of “Taqwa” -- faith, as well as deeds and actions. Therefore, Allah's promised rewards are also distributed to individuals in strictly equal terms, based on merit and not gender. “Whether male or female, whoever in faith does a good deed for the sake of Allah will be granted a good life, and rewarded in proportion to the best of what they have accomplished”. (Qur’an16: 97).

A Small Change is all that is Necessary:
Allah tells us that, “in whatever you are occupied when you recite the Qur’an, and in any other work you may be doing…We are a witness to your actions…AND even the smallest things that you do, do not go unrecorded” (Qur’an 10: 61). Thus, even a small action can have major impact on the individual self, others, society, and the world. So if Islam is a prescription for internal and external peace, then change comes about -- to paraphrase Edward Lorenz's “butterfly effect” -- through active application and not benign neglect.
The solution focused therapist’s approach is that no matter how complex and difficult the situation, making only a small change in one person’s behavior can lead to profound and far-reaching differences in the behavior of all persons involved. This approach applies the same Qur’anic principle that “a small change is all that is necessary.”

Change is Constant:
The Qur’an states that change is both constant, and inevitable. “You shall surely travel from stage to stage,” (Qur’an 84:19). Addressing the question of heaven (the Hereafter), it says, “We have built Heaven with power. Verily, We are expanding it” (Qur’an 51:47).
The solution focused therapist’s foundational understanding that “change is inevitable,” parallels the Qur’anic concept that nothing stays still in all of creation, including the diverse situations of humanity.

Emphasis on Goal Setting:
It is often said that that the most successful among us are those who set small, attainable goals, and reach them. With consistent application toward these “attainable goals,” life then becomes a series of positive reinforcements; ultimately, we make it to the end point, the “pot of gold” as it were. But those who set huge, unrealistic goals are destined for disappointment and failure. Solution Focused Therapy’s approach to setting attainable goals (specific, concrete, and in behavioral terms) with the full participation of the client, reflects the Qur’anic world view that there is no divorce between thought and action; “the human being can have nothing but what he/she strives for” (Qur’an 53:39).

Emphasis on Cultural and Racial Neutrality:
As a universal religion, Islam views each individual in exactly the same way, since God “created you of a single soul” (Qur’an 4:1), with some characteristics that distinguish oneself from all other humans. Thus it recognizes racial, cultural and religious differences, seeking to preserve them by addressing the psychological and spiritual needs of those living within its sphere. “We have created you male and female and have made you nations and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the noblest of you in the eyes of Allah is the best of you in 'Taqwa,' faith and action” (Qur’an 49:13).
Solution Focused Therapy's emphasis on individual behavior for the locus of change, rather than race and culture, is parallel to the Qur’anic concept of “vicegerency,” or being representatives of Allah. This implies that all human beings, independent of gender and race, are held accountable for their actions and behavior; the Qur’an further points out that without these attributes, the human condition cannot change.

The Miracle Question:
This is a rather intriguing concept of Solution Focused Therapy, because of its dual connotations -- clinical as well as religious. First, it seeks to set specific and concrete goals through the process of thought and action, both of which are within the control of the individual. Secondly, it seeks to foster a belief in change (through goals and action) that is understood to happen beyond the control of the individual. This parallels the Qur’anic concept of one God (Tawhid), who has the ultimate power to change human conditions and situations. In other words, miracles do happen, because Allah answers the prayers of those who call upon Him; “do not despair of the mercy of God…Indeed God is Most Forgiving, most Merciful” (Qur’an 39:53).
As our society, Canada's in particular, moves away from the melting-pot ideal and toward that of cultural and religious pluralism, so must psychotherapy and clinical counseling move from a secular assimilationist perspective back to more orthodox ideologies in order to meet the varied needs of multicultural communities. Therefore, clinical assessment should go beyond an analysis of the presenting problem(s) and the identification of individual pathologies, to include the religious, cultural, social and personal experiences of these families. As a result, the emphasis on diagnosis and assessment of families can become holistic, rather than fragmented into body, mind, and social environment.

REFERENCES
- AbdulSulayman, A AbdulHamid. (1993) Crisis in the Muslim Mind: translation by Yusuf Taalal DeLorenzo.
- Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought.
- Bucaille Maurice. (1979) The Bible The Qur’an and Science: Pakistan: Kazi Publications.
- Irving. T.B. (1991) The Qur’an: India: Goodword Books
- McGolderick, M. (1982) Ethnicity and Family Therapy: an overview. In: M.McGolderick, J. Pearce and J. Giordano (eds), Eethnicity and Family Therapy. New York: Guildford.
- Muhsin-Wadud, Amina. (1992) Qur’an and Woman. Kauala Lumpur: Penerbit Fajar Bakti Sdn.bhd.
- Tarrant, D. (1987) Family Therapy with Evangelical Christian Families: Dissertation submitted for Diploma in family marital therapy. University of London, Institute of Psychiatry
- Valiante. C. Wahida. (1992) Domestic Violence in the South Asian Family: Treatment and Research issues. In South Asian Symposium: a Reader in South Asian Studies, The Center for South Asian Studies Graduate Students’ Union, University of Toronto 1993.
- Yousef Ali. The Glorious Qur’an

Reference: www.arabpsynet.com

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