Everyday functions and needs of individuals with disability: a reliability and validity study based on the principles of the ICF.

INTRODUCTION: The goal of this study was to develop and validate a questionnaire to measure everyday functions of individuals with disability based on the principles of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). METHODS: Participants consisted of 1116 individuals. The final sample was representative for the following criteria: disability, gender, age, and residence. The questionnaire consisted of 4 sections. In addition to general and demographic questions, we developed 258 statements about everyday functioning based on the items from the ICF. RESULTS: The Cronbach alphas showed adequate internal reliability for the different scales: range of Cronbach alphas on the main sample: .624 to .904; range of Cronbach alphas on the test-retest sample: .627 to .921. Correlations with validating scales were typically high. Individuals with disability showed lower mean scores in each area compared to controls but the profiles of the different groups with disability varied across areas. The data also showed that physical status by itself does not determine everyday functioning. Several participants across groups showed that despite severe physical disability, one may exhibit high values of everyday functioning and well-being. CONCLUSION: Our questionnaire is a valid and reliable method to measure everyday functioning in individuals with different disabilities. The various versions of the questionnaire (computerized, paper-pencil, easy to understand) ensure that everyone's functioning and well-being can be assessed.

On the objectivity of the scoring of Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility.

The authors analyzed the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A, scores of 1,887 subjects. In addition to the usual self-scoring, trained observers also scored the behavioral manifestations of the subjects according to the same standardized criteria during the sessions. Self- and observer-scoring proved to be internally consistent and highly correlated (r = .832). Item-by-item analysis, however, yielded notable differences. Subjects and observers scored items differently in about 20% of the cases; only 3 items showed no systematic bias toward pass or fail. Many subjects' hypnotizability level would be classified differently according to observer categorization (Cohen's Kappa = .563). We suggest reconsidering the "objectivity" of self-scoring.

[Empirical data regarding the relationship between religiosity and substance abuse]. / Empirikus adatok a vallasossag es droghasznalat kapcsolatanak kerdeskorehez.

Research concerning the topic of possible association of religiosity and substance use has already brought forth a significant amount of data, identifying strong belief in a religion as a protective factor in most cases. However, as in all other subject areas dealing with correlations between religion and health components, the issue of religiosity and substance (ab)use also produced some conflicting findings, hindering the formulation of a clear and stable consensus interpretation of this relationship. The aim of our examination was to provide empirical data for clarifying uncertainties about the possible effects of religiosity on substance use by examining a sample which is remarkable in Hungary: 1337 clinically diagnosed drug abuser patients and 205 normal controls. Based on our results we suggest some changes on the general approach of the effect of religiosity on substance use.

Grammatical sensitivity and working memory in children with language impairment.

Children with primary language impairment (LI) show a deficit in processing different grammatical structures, verb inflections, and syntactically complex sentences among other things (Clahsen-Hansen 1997; Leonard et al. 1997). Cross-linguistic research has shown that the pattern of performance is language-specific. We examined grammatical sensitivity to word order and agreement violations in 50 Hungarian-speaking children with and without LI. The findings suggest a strong association between sensitivity to grammatical violations and working memory capacity. Variations in working memory performance predicted grammatical sensitivity. Hungarian participants with LI exhibited a weakness in detecting both agreement and word order violations.

Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): A cross-linguistic comparison.

BACKGROUND: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. AIMS: To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory performance. It was examined whether syntactic complexity has a larger impact on working memory performance than sentence length in Hungarian-speaking children, similar to the findings in English speaking children. METHODS & PROCEDURES: In Experiment 1, performance accuracy was measured with two linguistic span tasks that included stimuli with varying sentence length and syntactic complexity. Experiment 2 examined the impact of sentence length and morphological complexity on working memory performance. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Children with SLI performed more poorly than their age-matched peers in all working memory tasks. Their error patterns differed from those of children with typical language development. Children with SLI produced a high number of interference errors that indicate poor executive functions. The findings were compared with previous results of English-speaking children. Complexity affected working memory performance accuracy differently across languages. In English, it was the increase of syntactic complexity that resulted in a decrease in performance accuracy, whereas in Hungarian, it was the morphological complexity that had a large impact on working memory performance. CONCLUSIONS: Working memory performance depends on the linguistic characteristics of the language tested. In both English- and Hungarian-speaking children, complexity has a larger effect on verbal working memory performance than the length of the stimuli. However, complexity affects working memory performance accuracy differently across languages.

[Victimization and alcohol problems in the families of disabled persons]. / Viktimizáció és alkoholprobléma fogyatékkal élok családjaiban. Egy eset-kontroll kutatás eredményei.

Few research data are available on the addiction problems that occur in the families of persons living with disability. There is even less information on the extent of violence disabled people experience in their families as violence directed at them, and little is known how this is connected to alcohol and drug use that may occur in the families of the different groups of disabled persons as compared to healthy control samples. We sought an answer to this question through a case-control study involving 245 young people with disability and 60 healthy controls, using structured interview methods (EuropASI, EuroADAD) and self-assessment questionnaires (Temperament and Character Inventory, Juvenile Victimisation Questionnaire, Child Abuse and Trauma Scale). The presence of a drinking problem in the family was clearly identified as a predictor of an increased risk of victimization, of the occurrence of various types of victimization events, and of their greater frequency. The strong effect of a drinking problem in the family on substance use, psychiatric state and difficulties in aggression management was also confirmed. The predictive effect of a drinking problem was manifested in various ways in different disability groups. Our data draw attention to the link between victimization and drinking problems that can be observed in the families of disabled people, and to the importance of prevention which could help in improving the quality of life of the persons living with disability.

A case report: Pavlovian conditioning as a risk factor of heroin 'overdose' death.

BACKGROUND: The authors present a case illustrating a mechanism leading directly to death which is not rare but has received little attention. CASE PRESENTATION: The case was evaluated by autopsy, investigation of morphine concentration in the blood, and clinical data. The heroin dose causing the 'overdose' death of a young man who had previously been treated a number of times for heroin addiction did not differ from his dose of the previous day taken in the accustomed circumstances. The accustomed dose taken in a strange environment caused fatal complications because the conditioned tolerance failed to operate. The concentration of morphine in the blood did not exceed the level measured during earlier treatment. CONCLUSION: These results are in line with the data in the literature indicating that morphine concentrations measured in cases of drug-related death do not differ substantially from those measured in cases where the outcome is not fatal. A knowledge of the conditioning mechanism can contribute to prevention of fatal cases of a similar type. The harm reduction approach places great stress on preventive intervention based on data related to drug-related death.

[Psychiatric aspects of religiousness]. / A vallásosság pszichiátriai vonatkozásai.

Psychiatric aspects of religiousness have been a rather neglected research area in the near past despite the paradigm change in the religiousness research. This change is manifested in the increase of the number of research studies as well as the great development of research methodology. In this review the authors explore the most important cross points of religiousness and psychiatry with data on mental and physical health, substance use, dimensional characteristics of religiousness, and related factors as well.

[Symptom specificity of adolescents with self-injurious behavior]. / Onsérto magatartású serdülok tüneti jellegzetességei.

As an introductory part of the paper, authors give a short overview of existing results in the literature related to self-injurious behaviour and adolescents' deliberate self-harm. In their own random sample study, authors organized a self-report screen (provincial town, 3 educational facilities, 470 pupils aged between 14 and 18 years) by means of the translated version of Ottawa Self Injury Inventory (OSI) used widely in community-based studies in Canada. The Beck Depression Inventory was introduced to measure the key symptoms of depression among youngsters. 26 youngsters were found to have had at least one self-injurious action in their life-time. The authors describe the characteristics of these subjects on the basis of symptom occurrence statistics. Although the depressive symptoms have an expected correlation with the self-injurious ideas, depression does not seem to have the same relationships with the actual self-harm action. The authors attempt to give an explanation of this contradiction.