Bradley Hospital

About: Bradley Hospital is a healthcare organization based out in East Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Mental health & Bipolar disorder. The organization has 261 authors who have published 265 publications receiving 10477 citations.

Emotion Understanding (and Misunderstanding) in Clinically Referred Preschoolers: The Role of Child Language and Maternal Depressive Symptoms

Abstract: There is growing evidence to suggest that children with mental health problems have difficulties in emotion understanding, including particular biases in their processing of emotion information. However, less is known about the specific developmental and socialization processes that may contribute to difficulties in emotion understanding in young children with emotional and behavioral problems. The present study examines the roles of child receptive language and maternal depressive symptoms in predicting emotion understanding in clinically referred preschoolers. Participants were 79 preschool-aged children (3–5 years of age) who were admitted to a psychiatric day treatment program for young children and their families. Children participated in assessments of receptive language skills and emotion understanding and mothers completed self-report measures of depressive symptoms and child behavior problems. Children’s receptive language skills were positively associated with accuracy in identifying happy, sad, angry, and scared emotions, whereas maternal depressive symptoms were specifically linked to children’s biased perceptions of sadness. Findings underscore the role of both child and family factors as related to individual differences in emotion understanding in clinically referred preschoolers, with implications for developmentally informed and emotion-focused approaches to treatment of early childhood psychopathology.

The Influence of Circadian Timing on Olfactory Sensitivity.

Abstract: Olfactory sensitivity has traditionally been viewed as a trait that varies according to individual differences but is not expected to change with one's momentary state. Recent research has begun to challenge this position and time of day has been shown to alter detection levels. Links between obesity and the timing of food intake further raise the issue of whether odor detection may vary as a function of circadian processes. To investigate this question, 37 (21 male) adolescents (M age = 13.7 years) took part in a 28-h forced desynchrony (FD) protocol with 17.5 h awake and 10.5 h of sleep, for 7 FD cycles. Odor threshold was measured using Sniffin' Sticks 6 times for each FD cycle (total threshold tests = 42). Circadian phase was determined by intrinsic period derived from dim light melatonin onsets. Odor threshold showed a significant effect of circadian phase, with lowest threshold occurring on average slightly after the onset of melatonin production, or about 1.5○ (approximately 21:08 h). Considerable individual variability was observed, however, peak olfactory acuity never occurred between 80.5○ and 197.5○ (~02:22-10:10 h). These data are the first to show that odor threshold is differentially and consistently influenced by circadian timing, and is not a stable trait. Potential biological relevance for connections between circadian phase and olfactory sensitivity are discussed.

A Study of Experimental Methods for Teaching Emotionally Disturbed, Brain Damaged, Retarded Readers

Abstract: IN RECENT YEARS there has been a growing awareness that there is a distinct syndrome f r e quently associated with children who are slow learners, especially retarded readers, which has been characterized under such headings as "hyper kinetic disorder" (Laufer, Denhoff and Solomons, 1957), "minimally brain damaged" (Burks, 1957), "visual-motor impairment" (Strauss and Lehtinen, 1947), and "primary reading disturb ance" (Rabinovitch et al., 1956). Generally, these children are thought to have some central nervous system abnormality of function, subcortical or cor tical or both, which has interfered with their abil ity to receive or retain and reproduce visual, audi tory or motor cues, as well as inducing the behav ioral syndrome. Behaviorally, these children can often be identified in that they have a short atten tion span, are hyperactive, easily distracted, and readily overwhelmed by anything new or different. They reveal tendencies to perseverate, with con siderable difficulty in shifting, and poor ability to abstract and to generalize. In reading they often reverse words (such as "saw" for "was"), are unable to pronounce words and fail to develop effi cient techniques in reading new words. Their spell ing is usually quite poor because they have no un derstanding of letter sounds and have a poor con cept of phonics; there may be mirror writing with out awareness and their handwriting is often hard ly legible. These symptoms have been given de tailed attention by Strauss and Lehtinen (1947) and Strauss and Kephart (1955), and descriptions of these children can be found in recent artic les by Laufer et al., (1957) and Rabinovitch et al., (1956). The purpose of the present paper is to describe a remedial educational approach that has been found useful with children who evidence such diffi culties. This experimentation has been conducted at the Emma Pendleton Bradley Hospital, which is a residential treatment center for emotionally dis turbed children who have the potential of at 1 e a s t normal intelligence.