American journal of mental retardation : AJMR最新文献

Six types of antisocial and delinquent behaviors (e.g., property destruction and authority avoidance) were assessed in 526 youths (11 to 24 years of age) with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities and 1,030 11- to 18-year-olds without intellectual disabilities. Overall, 10% to 20% of youths with intellectual disabilities exhibited some type of antisocial and delinquent behavior, which were quite persistent over a 5-year period. Youths who exhibited one type of antisocial and delinquent behavior were likely to also exhibit other types of such behaviors. Being male, younger, and having behavioral problems particularly predicted these behaviors across a 5-year period. Overall, boys but not girls with intellectual disabilities exhibited antisocial and delinquent behaviors more often than peers without intellectual disabilities. Clinical implications and implications for future research are discussed.

Many researchers have recently explored the cognitive profile of velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS), a neurodevelopmental disorder linked to a 22q11.2 deletion. However, verbal short-term memory has not yet been systematically investigated. We explored verbal short-term memory abilities in a group of 11 children and adults presenting with VCFS and two control groups, matched on either CA or vocabulary knowledge, by distinguishing short-term memory for serial order and item information. The VCFS group showed impaired performance on the serial order short-term memory tasks compared to both control groups. Relative to the vocabulary-matched control group, item short-term memory was preserved. The implication of serial order short-term memory deficits on other aspects of cognitive development in VCFS (e.g., language development, numerical cognition) is discussed.

We studied instructional interactions through semi-structured observation of 13 student- teacher dyads involving elementary students with cognitive disabilities. Special educators' use of directions and responses of differing modes and types was analyzed. Student task-engagement behaviors (i.e., active engage, disruptive, passive on-task, off-task) provided a context for understanding differences in teacher styles. Results indicate that teacher directions were followed by student active engagement; and teacher responses, by student passive task-orientation. This higher quality feedback from students, together with outerdirectedness of students with cognitive disabilities, is postulated as a mechanism that maintains a high level of teacher directiveness. Sequential relationship patterns changed as student engagement levels varied, suggesting a child-driven model of teacher-child instructional interactions.

We examined the contribution of socioeconomic position to the health and mental health status of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities in a sample of 10,438 British children. Intellectual disability was a significant risk factor for poorer general health, OR = 4.5, emotional disorders, OR = 2.0, and conduct disorders, OR = 7.7. Between-group differences in socioeconomic position and household composition, however, accounted for 24% of the increased risk of poor health, 23% of the increased risk for conduct disorder, and 37% of the increased risk for emotional disorder. We concluded that socioeconomic disadvantage may account for a significant proportion of the increased risk for poorer health and mental health of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities.

Parenting was examined among families of children with borderline intelligence in comparison to families of typically developing children and children with developmental delays. Parenting data were obtained at child age 5 via naturalistic home observation. Mothers of children with borderline intelligence exhibited less positive and less sensitive parenting behaviors than did other mothers and were least likely to display a style of positive engagement. Children with borderline intelligence were not observed to be more behaviorally problematic than other children; however, their mothers perceived more externalizing symptoms than did mothers of typically developing children. Findings suggest the importance of mothers' explanatory models for child difficulties and highlight children with borderline intelligence as uniquely at risk for poor parenting.

Two sets of predictions were compared concerning the ability of 20 adults with profound, severe, or moderate intellectual disabilities to learn 15 everyday tasks. Predictions were made by caregivers who had worked with the participants for a minimum of 24 months and consideration of participant performance on the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test. Standardized training procedures were used to attempt to teach each task to each participant until a pass or fail criterion was met. Ninety-four percent of predictions based on ABLA performance were confirmed, and the ABLA was significantly more accurate for predicting client performance than were the caregivers. The utility of these results is discussed.

The Questions About Behavioral Function (QABF) scale is a caregiver report form designed to identify behavioral functions important in maintaining aberrant behavior. In the present investigation, we evaluated the psychometric properties of the QABF with an outpatient sample of 91 children with developmental delays and significant aberrant behavior (e.g., physical aggression, self-injury, and property destruction). One caregiver completed the QABF and Motivation Assessment Scale on aberrant behavior identified in a preappointment interview for each child. Results indicate that the QABF exhibited fair to good internal consistency, strong corrected item-total correlations, acceptable intersubscale correlations, and convergent validity with the Motivation Assessment Scale. Implications of the results, potential utility of caregiver report instruments, study limitations, and future directions are discussed.

A comprehensive understanding of the basic visual and cognitive abilities of individuals with mental retardation is critical for understanding the basis of mental retardation and for the design of remediation programs. We assessed visual search abilities in individuals with mild mental retardation and in MA- and CA-matched comparison groups. Our goal was to determine the effect of decreasing target-distracter disparities on visual search efficiency. Results showed that search rates for the group with mental retardation and the MA-matched comparisons were more negatively affected by decreasing disparities than were those of the CA-matched group. The group with mental retardation and the MA-matched group performed similarly on all tasks. Implications for theory and application are discussed.

The relation between the movement dynamic properties of sitting still and of seated body-rocking in adults with stereotyped movement disorder and mental retardation and a contrast group of typically developing age-matched adults was examined. Continuous measurement of sequential displacements in center-of-pressure was made using a force platform while subjects were engaged in seated body-rocking and quiet sitting. Properties of movement were compared across conditions (rocking, sitting) and groups (stereotyped movement disorder, contrast). The contrast group had the same modal frequency for both movement properties. The intrinsic dynamics of the stereotyped movement disorder group were similar to those of the contrast group for body-rocking but very different for quiet sitting. Findings support the suggestion that body-rocking in stereotyped movement disorder originates partly as an adaptation to an inability to control posture in a seated position.

We compared the expressive syntax and vocabulary skills of 35 boys with fragile X syndrome and 27 younger typically developing boys who were at similar nonverbal mental levels. During a conversational speech sample, the boys with fragile X syndrome used shorter, less complex utterances and produced fewer different words than did the typically developing boys after controlling for their nonverbal MA, speech intelligibility, and mother's education. The boys with fragile X used less complex noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence structure, but did not use fewer questions and negations. These findings suggest that the language difficulties in boys with fragile X reflect an overall expressive language delay and not a specific syntactic or vocabulary delay.