Mutuality and intimacy in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and normal boys\u27 friendship relations

The present study explored both the frequency and patterns of affective expression, play duration, and communicative exchange among dyads of boys diagnosed with ADHD with their friend. As expected, few significant differences between the two groups were revealed through frequency analyses, but interesting findings resulted from the examination of the patterns of behaviors (through sequential analyses). Overall, the results supported the hypothesis of less mutuality and intimacy in the friendships of boys diagnosed with ADHD. The boys in the ADHD/friend dyads were found to spend more time in nonassociative play during free-play and to be less likely to return to positive interaction after a shift to nonassociative play. In addition, the communicative exchange of the children in the AD HD/friend dyads was marked by marginally more conflict than was the communication between the normal/friend dyads. The patterns of communicative exchange revealed fewer shifts to reinforcement and personal information exchange by the ADHD children in their dyads, as well as overall fewer friend responses and more consecutive attention-directing shifts in the ADHD/friend dyads. Thus, as evidenced by these behaviors, it appears that the friendships of boys diagnosed with ADHD may be characterized by less mutuality and less intimacy than the friendships of normal control boys

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7