Adolescent Brain Development & Executive Functioning

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 ...

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...

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...