Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Violence in the Population of England: Does Comorbidity Matter?

It is unclear whether the association between Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and violence is explained by ADHD symptoms or co-existing psychopathology. We investigated associations of ADHD and its symptom domains of hyperactivity and inattention, among individuals reporting violence in the UK population. Methods We report data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (2007), a representative sample of the household population of England. A randomly selected sample of 7,369 completed the Adult Self-Report Scale for ADHD and the self-reported violence module, including repetition, injury, minor violence, victims and location of incidents. All models were weighted to account for non-response and carefully adjusted for demography and clinical predictors of violence: antisocial personality, substance misuse and anxiety disorders. Results ADHD was moderately associated with violence after adjustments (OR 1.75, p = .01). Hyperactivity, but not inattention was associated with several indicators of violence in the domestic context (OR 1.16, p = .03). Mild and moderate ADHD symptoms were significantly associated with violence repetition, but not severe ADHD where the association was explained by co-existing disorders. Stratified analyses further indicated that most violence reports are associated with co-occurring psychopathology. Conclusions The direct effect of ADHD on violence is only moderate at the population level, driven by hyperactivity, and involving intimate partners and close persons. Because violence associated with severe ADHD is explained by co-existing psychopathology, interventions should primarily target co-existing disorders

Team Learning: the Missing Construct from a Cross-Cultural Examination of Higher Education?

Team learning should be an important construct in organizational management research because team learning can enhance organizational learning and overall performance. However, there is limited understanding of how team learning works in different cultural contexts. Using an international comparative research approach, we developed a framework of antecedents and outcomes in the higher education context and tested it with samples from the UK and Vietnam. The results show that a common framework is applicable in the two different contexts, subject to slight modifications. However, this study does not find that team learning (measured via the proxy of “attitude towards team learning”) exhibits any statistically significant relationship as a predictor of the proposed outcomes. Other findings from this study on educational contexts are important not only to scholars in this field, but also for practicing managers, particularly those who study and operate in the extensive global market

Improving risk management for violence in mental health services: a multimethods approach

contractual_start_date: 07-2008 editorial_review_begun: 07-2014 accepted_for_publication: 06-2015contractual_start_date: 07-2008 editorial_review_begun: 07-2014 accepted_for_publication: 06-2015contractual_start_date: 07-2008 editorial_review_begun: 07-2014 accepted_for_publication: 06-2015contractual_start_date: 07-2008 editorial_review_begun: 07-2014 accepted_for_publication: 06-201

Meta-analysis and systematic review of teacher-delivered mental health interventions for internalizing disorders in adolescents

A large proportion of emotional problems begin in adolescence and negatively impact quality of life into adulthood. There have been multiple teacher-delivered, classroom-based programs created to reduce symptoms of internalizing problems amongst young people. This meta-analysis and systematic review aims to examine the effectiveness of teacher-delivered interventions for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms in adolescents, and a range of factors that may impact outcomes. Database searches were conducted from PsycInfo, Medline (PubMed), Scopus, the Cochrane Library and the British Educational Index (from database inception to January 2020). Quality assessment of studies was conducted using the EPHPP Quality Assessment Tool. Fifty-two intervention studies were identified that quantitatively assessed, via controlled design, intervention effects on internalizing disorder symptoms. Two meta-analyses found teacher-delivered interventions were significantly better than control conditions at improving depression (g = -0.12), anxiety (g = -0.13) and PTSD symptoms (g = -0.66) in students. Improvements were only maintained at follow-up for anxiety symptoms and no effect sizes reached a ‘small’ threshold. However, the effect sizes were ‘moderate’ within the context of universal prevention programs for young people. No interventions measured OCD outcomes. Overall, the findings suggest that teachers may not be the optimal deliverers of mental health interventions. Improved outcomes were associated with interventions that lasted up to 16 weeks, had program sessions of 45-90 minute duration, and included two or more days of training for teachers. Future studies should aim to improve reporting quality on number of sessions, teacher training and fidelity of intervention. Increased reporting of outcomes from adolescents with high versus low baseline mental health scores would enable a better understanding of for whom interventions are most effective

3. Development of Temas, A Multicultural Thematic Apperception Test: Psychometric Properties And Clinical Utility

INTRODUCTION The propriety of administering psychological tests standardized on nonminority, middle-class, and English-speaking populations to examinees who are not fluent in English or are from culturally or demographically diverse backgrounds has been a controversial topic for over five decades (Dana, 1993b; Olmedo, 1981). Although the controversy originally surrounded intelligence testing of Blacks, similar allegations of bias toward Hispanics have been raised in the context of personality testing and diagnostic evaluation, a topic which is our present focus. The prevailing view is that in the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, standard mental health evaluation procedures are considered unbiased (e. g., Lopez, 1988). The other side of the polemic argues that clients\u27 variations in English-language proficiency, cultural background, or demographic profile pose potential sources of bias for standard assessment and diagnostic practices (e.g., Dana, 1993b; Malgady, Rogler, & Costantino, 1987). That is, behavior recorded in an assessment situation-whether by symptom rating scale, projective test or face-to-face psychiatric interview- may present a distorted image of the attributes the assessment process is intended to reveal. Even in the absence of compelling empirical evidence, we argue that assessment procedures ought not to be routinely generalized to different cultural groups, and multicultural tests and assessments should be increasingly used (Costantino, 1992; 1993; Malgady, 1990, 1996). This chapter first presents a review of selected literature on the topic of multicultural assessment. This literature is organized according to a variety of definitions of test bias in accordance with psychometric tradition: face and content validity, mean differences, factor invariance, differential validity/prediction, and measurement equivalence. We then turn to a specific effort to develop a culturally sensitive psychological assessment technique for pluralistic groups: the TEMAS ( Tell-Me-A-Story ) test. Developmental and psychometric research on this test has been conducted on Hispanic children and adolescents, as well as Blacks and Whites. Finally, the clinical utility of the TEMAS test is illustrated through the presentation of three case studies

Category Size, Feature Comparison, and the Comprehension of Figurative Propositions

Two groups of 20 subjects made comparative judgments about either the similarity between the subject and predicate nouns linked in a metaphor or the goodness of a metaphor as a figure of speech. Psychological scaling of metaphorical propositions indicated that semantic decisions were internally consistent. Adjectives which reduced category (predicate noun) size in a proposition increased similarity and figural goodness. When two adjectives were used to modify subject and predicate nouns, similarity and figural goodness were higher in comparison to metaphors containing only one adjective. In addition, the number of highly salient semantic features shared by nouns was varied over replications. Nouns which shared two salient features were judged more similar and formed better figures of speech than those sharing only one feature. Results were discussed as evidence for comparison of features in the comprehension of semantic relations. </jats:p