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Biomedical subjects

J Rojahn

Publications and source records attributed to J Rojahn.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Self-injurious behavior: gene-brain-behavior relationships.

This paper summarizes a conference held at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development on December 6-7, 1999, on self-injurious behavior [SIB] in developmental disabilities. Twenty-six of the top researchers in the U.S. from this field representing 13 different disciplines discussed environmental mechanisms, epidemiology, behavioral and pharmacological intervention strategies, neurochemical substrates, genetic syndromes in which SIB is a prominent behavioral phenotype, neurobiological and neurodevelopmental factors affecting SIB in humans as well as a variety of animal models of SIB. Findings over the last decade, especially new discoveries since 1995, were emphasized. SIB is a rapidly growing area of scientific interest to both basic and applied researchers. In many respects it is a model for the study of gene-brain-behavior relationships in developmental disabilities.

Animals↗
PubMed2001

The Behavior Problems Inventory: an instrument for the assessment of self-injury, stereotyped behavior, and aggression/destruction in individuals with developmental disabilities.

The Behavior Problems Inventory (BPI-01) is a 52-item respondent-based behavior rating instrument for self-injurious, stereotypic, and aggressive/destructive behavior in mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. Items are rated on a frequency scale and a severity scale. The BPI-01 was administered by interviewing direct care staff of 432 randomly selected residents from a developmental center between the ages of 14 to 91 years. For 73% of those selected, at least one problem was endorsed on the BPI-01. A total of 43% showed self-injury, 54% stereotyped behavior, and 38% aggressive/destructive behavior. Confirmatory factor analysis and item-total correlations supported the three a priori factors. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) showed that of the variables age, sex, and level of mental retardation, only the latter had a significant effect on the BPI-01 total score, the SIB subscale score, and the Stereotyped Behavior subscale score. Aggression/destruction was not significantly related to any of the three variables. Individuals with a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder had higher scores on all three subscales than those without, whereas residents with a diagnosis of stereotyped movement disorder had higher Stereotyped Behavior scale scores than those without. The BPI-01 was found to be a reliable (retest reliability, internal consistency, and between-interviewer-agreement) and valid (factor and criterion validity) behavior rating instrument for problem behaviors in mental retardation and developmental disabilities with a variety of potentially useful applications. Strengths and limitations of the instrument are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Role of planning, attention, and simultaneous and successive cognitive processing in facial recognition in adults with mental retardation.

Fifty adults with mental retardation completed the Cognitive Assessment System and the Facial Discrimination Task. Performances on the Facial Discrimination Task Emotion and Age Tasks were significantly correlated to the Cognitive Assessment System total score. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that processing of emotional stimuli was related to simultaneous and successive processing; whereas attention and planning failed to add significantly. The Emotion and Age Tasks yielded similar results, suggesting that cognitive processes are involved in processing facial stimuli in a similar way regardless of the type of facial cues involved. The results are discussed vis-à-vis modular models of emotion, future research directions, and the Age Task as a control task.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Intellectual classification of Black and White children in special education programs using the WISC-III and the Cognitive Assessment System.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Third Edition and the Cognitive Assessment System were compared for a sample of 78 White and Black students in special education programs for children with mental retardation. Results showed that the WISC-III identified more children as having mental retardation than did the Cognitive Assessment System. More important, however, the WISC-III classified disproportionately more Blacks than Whites as having mental retardation as compared to the Cognitive Assessment System. Results imply that the problem of disproportionate representation of Black children in special education classes for children with mental retardation may be addressed if the Cognitive Assessment System were used instead of the WISC-III.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

Reliability and validity studies of the Facial Discrimination Task for emotion research.

The Facial Discrimination Task (FDT) (Erwin, R.J., Gur, R.C., Gur, R. E., Skolnick, B., Mawhinney-Hee, M., Smailis, J., 1992. Facial emotion discrimination: I. Task construction and behavioural findings in normal participants. Psychiatry Research 42, 231-240.) consists of standardized black-and-white photographs of Caucasian actors exhibiting happy, sad, and neutral faces. Originally designed for brain-imaging research in emotion recognition in schizophrenia and major depression, it has since been successfully employed in emotion recognition studies on mental retardation and psychosomatic disorders. This article presents new basic psychometric data from three studies with a total of 401 college undergraduates. Content validity, item reliability (test-retest, item-total correlation, item difficulty) and test reliability (internal consistency) were established. Happy and sad items were easier to agree upon than neutral ones. In general, happy items had the highest validity, highest test-retest reliability, and highest item-total correlations. Recognition errors of neutral items were biased toward negative affect. Advantages and limitations of the FDT for clinical research applications are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Put your money where your mouth is: direct and indirect measures of attitude toward community integration.

We compared direct (a survey) and indirect (mock petition drive) attitude measures regarding opening a group home for people with mental retardation in the neighborhood. We systematically assigned participants to one of three groups: positively worded petition statement, negative statement, or no petition. All participants answered survey questions about attitudes toward persons with disabilities. Order of the measures was counterbalanced in the first two groups. The point-biserial correlation between the petition response and survey was a moderate .40, suggesting that the survey was not a very reliable predictor of how people would react when asked whether they agreed or objected to a group home being opened in their neighborhood. Survey responses were influenced further by the wording of the petition drive statement.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1997

Emotion recognition as a function of social competence and depressed mood in individuals with intellectual disability.

The present study was designed to test whether social competence and mood were predictive of the performance by adults with mild or moderate intellectual disability on a matching-to-sample task using facially expressed emotions as stimuli. Thirty-eight subjects were assigned to either a depressed mood group or a non-depressed mood group based on their scores on the two depression sub-scales of the Reiss Screen for Maladaptive Behavior. The groups were matched on sex, age and level of intellectual disability. Each group consisted of 10 women and nine men; 12 participants in each group had mild and seven had moderate intellectual disability, respectively. Social competence was assessed with the Social Performance Survey Schedule (SPSS). Performance on the matching-to-sample task correlated positively with the subjects' level of intellectual disability, their mood scores and the scores on the Appropriate Skills sub-scale of the SPSS. The implications of these findings for social skills training programmes and limitations of this study are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

The Stereotyped Behavior Scale for adolescents and adults with mental retardation.

The development of the Stereotyped Behavior Scale for adolescents and adults with mental retardation was described. Service provider staff in three states selected 600 clients known for stereotypic behaviors and then used 66 items to rate the frequency of occurrence of these behaviors. Items with test-retest reliability less than .45 and/or interrater agreement less than .30 were deleted. The remaining 30 items were subjected to a principal component analysis with varimax rotation. A single-factor solution emerged, which explained 24.9% of the variance. After eliminating 4 items with low factor loadings, we found that the final 26-item Stereotyped Behavior Scale had an internal consistency alpha of .88, test-retest reliability was pI = .90, and interrater reliability was pI = .76.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Fenfluramine and methylphenidate in children with mental retardation and borderline IQ: clinical effects.

A double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study of methylphenidate (0.4 mg/kgday) and different doses of fenfluramine (1.0, 1.5, or 2.0 mg/g/day) in children with mental retardation or borderline IQ and ADHD was conducted. Parents, teachers, examiners, and physicians rated the children. There were relatively few significant drug effects by condition. When the optimal fenfluramine dose for each child was compared with placebo and methylphenidate, significant improvements occurred for fenfluramine on several parent and teacher subscales; teachers rated the children as somewhat improved with methylphenidate. The highest dose of fenfluramine produced more behavior compliance but apparently at the cost of cognitive efficiency. Most side effects (drowsiness, dizziness, anorexia) occurred with fenfluramine. Both drugs appear to be effective treatments for children with ADHD and mental retardation, although there is a possible neurotoxic action with fenfluramine. We recommend a gradual phase-in of fenfluramine dosage, up to 1.5 mg/kg/day, for most children.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Emotion specificity in mental retardation.

The emotion-specificity hypothesis states that mental retardation is associated with deficits in decoding facially expressed emotions that cannot be fully accounted for by MA. Research has demonstrated repeatedly that subjects with mental retardation do not perform as well on emotion recognition tasks as do control subjects but not whether those performance deficits are specific to affective cues. The emotion-specificity hypothesis was tested further with three groups of 16 subjects: adults with mild to moderate mental retardation, similar age adults without mental retardation, and children without mental retardation matched for mental age (MA). Subjects completed the Facial Discrimination Task, which has two subtasks consisting of 40 monochrome facial photographs, and rated stimuli on scales ranging from happy to sad or from young to old. Results supported the emotion-specificity hypothesis: The retarded group was significantly less accurate on the emotion task than were both control groups. On the age task the retarded adult group and nonretarded child group were less accurate than the adult control group.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

A comparison of assessment methods for depression in mental retardation.

Investigated the association between various depression assessment methods in 38 adults with mild or moderate mental retardation, half of whom had relatively high and the other half had relatively low depression screening scores. Measures included a standard psychiatric interview (Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents), an informant rating scale (Reiss Screen for Maladaptive Behavior), and a self-report measure (Self-Report Depression Questionnaire). Association between measures was generally low, yielding discordant classification results. Potential reasons for these discrepancies were offered, and implications for clinical and research assessment of mood disorders in mental retardation were discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Joint occurrence of depression and aggression in children and adults with mental retardation.

The relationship between aggression and depression was evaluated for 528 adults, adolescents and children, who were rated on either the adult or child versions of the Reiss instruments for dual diagnosis (Reiss 1988; Reiss & Valenti-Hein 1990). Criterion levels of depression were evident in about four times as many aggressive as nonaggressive subjects. Anger was significantly associated with both aggression and depression. Although anger may play a mediational role in the correlation between aggression and depression, in this study there was a significant correlation even after the effects of anger were held constant. The findings provide an initial step toward improving diagnostic specificity when evaluating aggressive behaviour in people with mental retardation.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

The association between psychiatric diagnoses and severe behavior problems in mental retardation.

To investigate the relationship between psychiatric disorders and severe behavior problems in mental retardation, statewide client databases from developmental disabilities services in California (N = 89,419) and New York (N = 45,683) were analyzed and juxtaposed. The study focussed on nine major DSM-III-R psychiatric categories (or their equivalents), and severe forms of aggressive behavior, property destruction, self-injurious behavior, and stereotyped behavior in individuals 45 years old and younger with mental retardation of all levels of severity. In California, 3.9% had at least one psychiatric diagnosis; in New York, 5.4%. The rate of specific psychiatric diagnoses was variable across states, suggesting local preferences in diagnostic practices. Severe behavior problems occurred in 22.1% in California and in 41.4% in New York. This difference in rates can be attributed in part to different recording criteria for behavior problems. With regard to the association between psychiatric diagnoses and problem behaviors the results were consistent across databases: No compelling correlations were found. This means that neither aggression, self-injury, destruction, nor stereotypies determine whether a person receives a psychiatric diagnosis or not.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Biological and environmental risk for poor developmental outcome of young children.

A cross-sectional retrospective study was conducted to develop and field test a state-wide screening method for identifying children at risk for developmental problems. Families of 2.5- to 3-year-old children were sampled from the Ohio birth certificate register. Standardized telephone interviews were conducted with 1,601 parents concerning home environment and demographic characteristics. Developmental delay, the outcome variable, was defined by low scores on an abbreviated Developmental Profile II, which was also administered over the telephone. Obstetric history and health status of the newborns was obtained from birth certificates. By means of logistic regression analysis, we found six independent variables representing environmental and biological determinants.

Child Development↗
PubMed1991

The Aberrant Behavior Checklist with children and adolescents with dual diagnosis.

The Aberrant Behavior Checklist (ABC; Aman, Singh, Stewart, & Field, 1985a, 1985b) is a 58-item third-party informant rating scale originally developed for institutionalized, low-functioning adolescents and adults. The present study investigated the appropriateness of the scale for youngsters with dual diagnosis of mental retardation and psychiatric disturbance. Over a period of 2 1/2 years, 204 patients (199 after data reduction) from a child psychiatry unit were rated twice daily by direct care staff. Data analysis addressed internal consistency, interrater reliability, criterion validity, and robustness of the factor structure. Internal consistency was satisfactory with alpha coefficients ranging from .82 to .94. Interrater reliability varied between subscales but was relatively low (Pearson correlations between .39 to .61). In terms of its criterion validity, the ABC was sensitive to psychiatric diagnoses and age and the original 5-factor structure was robust (congruence coefficients ranged between .80 to .89). Yet, only a relatively small proportion of the variance (31.5%) was explained by factor analysis indicating possible limitations of the ABC for this population. Given the paucity of assessment instruments for this particular population and the difficulty involved in developing new population-specific instruments, the ABC can be recommended for children and adolescents with dual diagnosis.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Predictors of urgency of out-of-home placement needs.

A random sample of 137 families from an out-of-home placement waiting list were surveyed through structured face-to-face interviews with the primary caregivers. Our purposes were to identify predictors of urgency of a family's placement need and obtain information about needed support services, which might help to maintain the person at home. A hierarchical regression analysis was calculated with caregiver stressors and behavior problems as independent variables and the urgency of out-of-home placement need as the dependent variable. Only caregiver stress variables emerged as a significant predictor.

Adolescent↗