Adolescent Brain Development & Executive Functioning

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=475067021089024030001017018025112005125033039077095007109009100022025026089069083027011106020047055036105026068118029073064110098057087032023091004064098015126004093008032002089025000092074101009123095003017127026082104093025070126009107094122084072&EXT=pdf To be reviewed:

The Mediating Effect of Adaptive and Maladaptive Emotion Regulation Strategies on Executive Functioning Impairment and Depressive Symptoms Among Adolescents Link to article: https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.western.edu/doi/full/10.1080/09297049.2016.1212986?scroll=top&needAccess=true In this study, authors Laura Wante, Amy Mezulis, Marie-Lotte Van Beveren and Caroline Braet note the growing body of evidence suggesting the connection between stunted executive functioning (EF) skills development during adolescence and the onset of depression.  While plenty of other articles have studied this connection, few have looked closely at the underlying mechanisms of the  connection, such as maladaptive emotion regulators.  Therefore, they focus specifically in the onset of maladaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies to compensate for lack of EF as a means of making one vulnerable to depression.  An example of a maladaptive emotion regulator is rumination. One thing that I found

The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Training on Behavioral Problems and Attentional Functioning in Adolescents with ADHD Link To Article: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=33&sid=bf1f871c-b662-4da2-a50e-176a7ff6618a%40sessionmgr103 The authors of this study sought to monitor the effects of Mindfulness training on several adolescents and their parents by way of a 16 week study that included behavior assessment tests, parental and adolescent mindfulness training, and test designed to measure attention and executive functioning behaviors.               To start, the authors go to great length in their efforts to justify this study.   I felt that this section was unnecessarily long as the topic has plenty of literature to back it up.   I got the sense that they went above and beyond in this section because their study was so small (by the end of the study, the results of only 6 adolescents were tallied.)   There were also some seeming

Executive Functioning in Adolescent Depressive Disorders.   Link to article: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=8&sid=bf1f871c-b662-4da2-a50e-176a7ff6618a%40sessionmgr103 In this study, the authors set out to pursue three hypotheses.   They were: 1)    Adolescent inpatients with depressive disorders that were not self-diagnosed would display lower performance on measures of executive functioning than the other inpatient and outpatient groups where depression was self-diagnosed. 2)    Regardless of depressive presentation, the inpatient groups would display lower performance on measures of executive functioning when compared to an outpatient group. 3)    Within those expressed inpatient adolescents, elevated self-reported depressive symptoms would be associated with worse performance on measures of executive functioning. The researchers used several tools to assess executive functioning across 5 different categories.   The 5 differ

Link To Article: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.western.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=9cd4bea2-268b-4ba5-8dd1-f25fcac1e804%40pdc-v-sessmgr03 This article was refreshing in that it took basic principles for teaching adolescents, derived from significant amounts of data, and put together a comprehensive article full of direct strategies for teachers to apply to their classrooms.  They also did a good job of starting off their paper with a comprehensive definition of what executive functioning is, something that a surprising amount of articles on executive functioning fail to do. They define executive function as "having the cognitive flexibility to plan, organize, stay focused, access one's working memory, and self regulate one's behavior."  The analogy that they posit to readers is that having a strong set of executive functioning skills is akin to having a good "air traffic controller working to maintain the safe, orderly and expeditious flo

Link to article: https://www.scribd.com/document/380571015/Stressful-Events-and-Executive-Functioning-in-Adolescents-with-and-without-History-of-Grade-Repetition In this article, Luiza Mothes, Christian Haag Kristensen, Rodrigo Grassi Olivera, Irani Iracema De Lima Argimon, Rochelle Paz Fonseca and Tatiana Quarti Irigaray noticed that there were only a few studies on the relationship between stressful events and grade repetition.  They decided then that their main goal was "to compare the frequency of exposure to stressful events, academic performance, executive functioning, and performance on working memory tasks between adolescents with and without a history of grade repetition." The authors were wise to note that the impact of a stressful event is not necessarily determined by the event itself, but by the appraisal of the event by the individual.  Since their participant pool was adolescents, they were quick to note that adolescents are not necessarily yet equipped w