ADHD

Stimulant medications such as Ritalin have been prescribed for decades to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and their popularity as “cognition enhancers” has recently surged among the healthy, as well.

What’s now starting to catch up is knowledge of what these drugs actually do in the brain. In a paper publishing online this week in Biological Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology researchers David Devilbiss and Craig Berridge report that Ritalin fine-tunes the functioning of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — a brain region involved in attention, decision-making and impulse control — while having few effects outside it. [continue reading…]

Children with autism and ADHD may soon get anxiety relief from a novel “deep-pressure” vest developed by Brian Mullen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The vest, which can also be used for adults with mental illness, delivers a “portable hug” called deep pressure touch stimulation (DPTS). [continue reading…]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but humans may have even less to work with than previously thought. University of Missouri researchers found that the average person can keep just three or four things in their “working memory” or conscious mind at one time. This finding may lead to better ways to assess and help people with attention-deficit and focus difficulties, improve classroom performance and enhance test scores.“Most people believe the human mind is incredibly complex,” said Jeff Rouder, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science. “We were able to use a relatively simple experiment and look at how many objects can be in maintained in the human conscious mind at any one time. We found that every person has the capacity to hold a certain number of objects in his or her mind. Working memory is like the number of memory registers in a computer. Every object takes one register and each individual has a fixed number of registers. Limits in working memory are important because working memory is the mental process of holding information in a short-term, readily accessible, easily manipulated form where it can be combined, rearranged and stored more productively.” [continue reading…]

New research led by Dr Nathalie Fontaine, UCL Psychology, has found that hyperactivity and aggression in young girls is linked to greater risk of smoking addiction, mentally abusive relationships, teenage pregnancy and low job prospects later in life.

In a collaborative study published in ‘Archives of General Psychiatry’, Dr Fontaine’s team followed the lives of 810 young Canadian girls from the age of six to 21. Around one in ten had hyperactive behaviour, while another one in ten had both hyperactive and aggressive behaviour. While for the majority of girls, these behaviours calmed down by the age of 12, these two groups showed a higher tendency to develop adjustment problems in adulthood. [continue reading…]