Three reasons why parental burnout is more prevalent in individualistic countries: a mediation study in 36 countries.

PURPOSE: The prevalence of parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children, varies dramatically across countries and is highest in Western countries characterized by high individualism. METHOD: In this study, we examined the mediators of the relationship between individualism measured at the country level and parental burnout measured at the individual level in 36 countries (16,059 parents). RESULTS: The results revealed three mediating mechanisms, that is, self-discrepancies between socially prescribed and actual parental selves, high agency and self-directed socialization goals, and low parental task sharing, by which individualism leads to an increased risk of burnout among parents. CONCLUSION: The results confirm that the three mediators under consideration are all involved, and that mediation was higher for self-discrepancies between socially prescribed and actual parental selves, then parental task sharing, and lastly self-directed socialization goals. The results provide some important indications of how to prevent parental burnout at the societal level in Western countries.

Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study.

High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71% mothers; Mage = 39.20) and showed that the prevalence of parental burnout varies dramatically across countries. Analyses of cultural values revealed that individualistic cultures, in particular, displayed a noticeably higher prevalence and mean level of parental burnout. Indeed, individualism plays a larger role in parental burnout than either economic inequalities across countries, or any other individual and family characteristic examined so far, including the number and age of children and the number of hours spent with them. These results suggest that cultural values in Western countries may put parents under heightened levels of stress. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-020-00028-4.

A verbal planning impairment in adult ADHD indexed by script generation tasks.

OBJECTIVE: Though juvenile and adult ADHD cases are well known to have a nonverbal planning impairment, a verbal-planning impairment has been demonstrated only in juvenile ADHD. The purpose of this investigation is to determine whether a verbal planning impairment also characterizes adult ADHD. METHODS: A cohort of 30 adult ADHD clients of a university psychological clinic are compared to 30 age-, education-, gender-, and IQ-matched persons recruited from the general population who did not have ADHD. The dependent measure is a set of 6 paper/pencil 10-item script generation tasks. RESULTS: The findings reveal that the ADHD cohort was significantly impaired on the script task and the script task correlated significantly with severity of ADHD (CAARS index + WURS), whereas several neuropsychological measures of executive function (Stroop, COWA, Rey's Complex Figure, D2, CVLT, CPT-II) did not. Findings further showed that the script measure was weakly correlated with the other established neuropsychological measures of executive function (r < .46, shared variance of less than 21%). CONCLUSIONS: On the basis of the study findings, it is concluded that verbal planning measured with script generation tasks is distinctly impaired in clinically referred adult ADHD.

Executive functions and the obsessive-compulsive disorder: on the importance of subclinical symptoms and other concomitant factors.

Although reviews concerning the neuropsychology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) put great emphasis on impaired executive functioning, the overall conclusions are notoriously divergent. The main goal of the present study was to use a battery of neuropsychological tasks to assess nine cognitive domains with a special focus on executive functions in 40 patients with OCD. A secondary objective was to examine the relationships between clinical or demographic variables and neuropsychological performances. The third goal was to separate executive functions in more homogeneous components to verify whether specific impairment might be found in persons with OCD. Confirming the main hypothesis, few neuropsychological differences emerged between the OCD and healthy participants when concomitant factors were controlled. Moreover, subclinical symptoms appeared to play a different and independent role on the cognitive results. Future studies should include more specific tasks of lower-order executive functions among persons with OCD to confirm this possibility.

The relative importance of suboperations of prospective memory.

An event-based and a time-based prospective memory (PM) task, a script generation task, several working memory tasks, an incidental retrospective memory task, and a screen clock were implemented on the computer in one integrated procedure lasting between one and two hours. The procedure was designed to simulate four working days and four nights for a white-collar employee. Sixty-eight normal participants completed the task. Time-based prospective memory (self-injecting and going to bed at preordained times of day) shared unique variance with clock checking, but hardly at all with incidental retrospective memory. On the other hand, event-based prospective memory (answering a faint telephone cue as quickly as possible) shared unique variance with incidental retrospective memory of formally task irrelevant context and less with clock checking. The latter correlational dissociation of event-based versus time-based PM by retrospective memory reached significance, inspiring the idea that administrative versus clerical work might each impose its own type of PM demands. In both types of PM, low-level abilities (use of external aids and incidental encoding of context, respectively) seem to be critical for good performance, more so than for high-order executive functions. Our software is offered to the readership to explicitate these findings further or for other research pursuits.

Neuropsychological and activity of daily living script performance in patients with positive or negative schizophrenia.

Cognitive and psychiatric determinants of impairment of complex activities of daily living (ADLs) were investigated in 33 schizophrenic patients and 16 normal comparison subjects. The schizophrenic patients were cognitively impaired and were deficient in the ADL. However, the impairment of ADL could not be explained specifically by impairment of higher-order executive function or by negative symptoms: memory functions were more related to impairment of ADL and positive symptoms as much as the negative ones. Positive symptoms were significantly related to commissive errors in the ADL, whereas negative symptoms were nonsignificantly related to omissive errors. Negative symptoms were significantly more related to memory impairment than to impairment on measures of higher-order executive function (working memory). This investigation demonstrates that an ecologically oriented approach to test development and measurement of ADL is fruitful in understanding schizophrenia-especially if it is constrained by cognitive constructs compatible with the phenomenology of the disease.

[Kitchen and schizophrenia: a crossroad activity of an ecological, occupational and neuropsychological assessment]. / Cuisine et schizophrénie: activité carrefour d'une évaluation écologique, ergothérapique et neuropsychologique.

In this exploratory study, the authors examine the various occupational and neuropsychological assessments used to analyze deficits qualitatively and quantitatively in patients with schizophrenia. Considering that it is necessary to further explore their repercussion on the performance of activity of daily living (ADL) and domestic activities (DA), they thus attempt to verify if the distinction between two levels of functional autonomy could translate at the cognitive and clinical levels in (25) 23 patients included in a program destined to young adults (schizophrenia spectrum DSM-IV criteria) in Montréal. These patients had the opportunity, within the clinical program, to submit to neuropsychological evaluations as well as evaluations offered by the occupational therapy service thanks to a tool frequently used by occupational therapists entitled Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS). The objective of this article is to conjugate two possible perspectives, drawn from two different disciplines, on a very current human activity such as "preparing meals" in people suffering from schizophrenia and which functioning of daily life is disturbed.

Remembering the past and foreseeing the future while dealing with the present: a comparison of young adult and elderly cohorts on a multitask simulation of occupational activities.

Thirty-five young adult and 38 elderly cybernauts, matched for education, sex, alcohol consumption, and time/day of computer use were compared on a computerized simulation of professional activities of daily living (ADLs). The program quantified performance in terms of speed and accuracy on four major constructs: (1) planning (a 30-item office party script); (2) prospective memory (injections, sleep, phone); (3) working memory (PASAT, D2, and CES analogs); and (4) retrospective memory. Participants had to organize an office party, self inject insulin and go to bed at requisite times of day, do "office work" at unpredictable times of day, and answer the phone that blinked but did not ring (near threshold stimulus). The elderly were markedly and equally impaired on all four constructs (F = 24.3, p < .000). The elderly were also equally and markedly impaired on slave and central executive systems (c.f. Baddeley's model) and on event-based and time-based prospective memory (c.f. McDaniel's model)-findings arguing against a "frontal" model of cognitive decline. This supports Salthouse's concept of a "general factors" decline in normal aging due to diffuse deterioration of the brain. On the other hand, as expected from previous findings, the balance of omissiveness/commissiveness was significantly increased in the elderly sample's error profile. Furthermore, the balance of speed and accuracy was significantly increased in the elderly. This defines limits of the "general factors" model. The elderly also markedly underused a clock icon which had to be clicked on to get the virtual time of day necessary for integrating all the required actions. Prospective memory explained 11% of the aging variance despite partialing out of the three other constructs, making it appear as a golden standard of sensititivity to normal aging-though perhaps provided it be implemented in a distracting, multitask, strategically demanding context.

Mental genesis of scripts in adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Twenty nine ADHD adolescents and 29 age, IQ and gender matched normal comparison subjects completed 6 paper pencil tasks of mental script generation. Each task required the subject to generate 10 chronologically ordered and necessary actions toward a goal. There were 3 levels of structure of the tasks (highly structured, moderately structured, unstructured) and each of these levels comprised a familiar and an unfamiliar script. The ADHD group made more sequencing errors on all the scripts, significantly so on the highly structured unfamiliar and on the moderately structured unfamiliar script tasks. The two groups were similar however with regard to the semantic structure (content) of the scripts and the total number of actions generated. Errors of omission, commission and perseveration were similar for the two groups. The results are interpreted as supportive of Barkley's (1997) frontal lobe dysfunction model of ADHD.

Assessment of executive dysfunction during activities of daily living in schizophrenia.

Many neuropsychological studies have described deficits of memory and executive functions in patients with schizophrenia, and the severity of these deficits seems to be determinant in predicting the community outcome of these patients [Schizophr. Bull. 26 (2000) 119]. However, neuropsychological evaluation does not provide valuable information about how the cognitive deficits directly affect daily living, that is, which cognitive deficit affects which behavior. The present study aimed at determining whether executive dysfunction in schizophrenia could be directly measured by analyzing three activities of daily living (ADL), in addition to assessing the ecological validity of commonly used neuropsychological tests. Within specific ADL (choosing a menu, shopping the ingredients, cooking a meal), the sequences of behaviors that have been performed by 27 control subjects and 27 patients with schizophrenia were both analyzed by using a preset optimal sequence of behavior. When compared with control subjects, patients with schizophrenia showed more omissions when choosing the menu, more sequencing and repetitions errors during the shopping task, and more planning, sequencing, repetition and omission errors during the cooking task. These behavioral errors correlated significantly with negative, but not with positive symptoms of the patients. Furthermore, they also correlated with the poor performances on executive neuropsychological tests, especially those sensitive to shifting and sequencing abilities, but not with memory tests. These results suggest that executive deficits in schizophrenia may specifically affect ADL and that such deficits can be quantitatively assessed with a behavioral scale of action sequences.

Script generation following frontal and parietal lesions.

The purpose of this investigation was to distinguish putative effects of parietal lobe lesions on script generation, in distinction from the better known and established effects of frontal lobe lesions. Nine patients, most with excised parietal lesions, were compared to nine age, gender and education matched normal participants. Eleven patients with excised tumors of the frontal lobe were compared to twelve age, gender and education matched normal subjects. Participants were requested to generate, out loud, scripts corresponding to everyday activities. Half the scripts were relatively more demanding with respect to temporal representation (understanding the time line of events) and the other half with respect to spatial representation (understanding the layout of the actions in space). These two conditions were further broken down into conditions of high and low demands on working memory (reciting the scripts backwards versus forward). The frontal lobe patients enunciated significantly fewer actions overall. They were also significantly more impaired than the normal participants on all tasks with high demands on working memory, and more often, high temporal demands (sequencing and perseverative errors). The parietal lobe patients had significant difficulty in sequencing in all conditions, and manifested no perseveration. Though script generation tasks have been primarily associated with frontal lobe function until now, consideration should be given to the type of activity being scripted as a function of relative demands on spatial or temporal representation, as well as working memory, and the contributions of other lobes ought to be taken into consideration.

Brain modules of hallucination: an analysis of multiple patients with brain lesions.

We systematically reviewed the localization of focal brain lesions that cause isolated hallucination in a single sensory modality. Case reports of post-lesion nonparoxysmal hallucination in 1 (and only 1) of 3 sensory modalities (i.e., visual, auditory, somatic) were reviewed, and the content of the qualitative descriptions was analyzed for each modality. The lesion is practically always located in the brain pathway of the sensory modality of the hallucination. There seem to exist localized sensory brain circuits that in healthy people diminish the intensity of internal sensory representation. After a lesion, hallucinosis seems to be caused also by compensatory overactivation of tissue in the nearby brain sensory pathway. This type of hallucination may indeed be termed a "release" form, whereby patients are aware of the hallucinatory nature of their experience, but not usually of "dream centres" as proposed by Lhermitte. Instead, we propose that it is dreaming that should be considered a special case of neural "release."

Cognitive structure of executive deficits in frontally lesioned head trauma patients performing activities of daily living.

OBJECTIVE: Executive functions in activities of daily living (ADL) were investigated in 10 patients with frontal lobe lesions after a mild to severe closed head injury (CHI). METHOD: The CHI patients were compared to 12 normal controls with a neuropsychological test battery, a script recitation task and a realistic simulation of complex multitask ADL (planning and preparing a meal). RESULTS: Though the CHI patients were significantly slow on one test and subject to interference on an attention test with parametric testing, the groups did not differ on any neuropsychological test with non parametric testing. However, the CHI patients manifested marked anomalies in the meal preparation task. While small sequences of actions were easily produced, large action sets could not be correctly executed. CONCLUSION: An outstanding deficit in strategic planning and prospective memory appears to be an important underpinning of the impairment of ADL observed in CHI patients with frontal lobe lesions.

Opposed left and right brain hemisphere contributions to sexual drive: a multiple lesion case analysis.

Brain topographical studies of normal men have have shown that sexual excitation is asymmetric in the brain hemispheres. Group studies of patients with unilateral epileptic foci and other studies of patients with unilateral brain lesions have come to the same conclusion. The present study reviewed previously published single case reports of patients with frank hypo or hypersexuality subsequent to a unilateral brain lesion. Hyposexual patients tended to have left hemisphere lesions (primarily of the temporal lobe), and hypersexual patients tended to have right hemisphere lesions (primarily of the temporal lobe) (p < 0.05). We interpret this double dissociation as part of a more general phenomenon of psychic tone similarly dissociated with regard to hemispheric control, including mood, psychomotor baseline, speech rate, and even immunity. The behavioral significance of this psychic tone is to modulate approach versus avoidance behavior.