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...

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...

Link to Article: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.western.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=72505655-86e0-4f6d-b104-d5d34b732029%40sdc-v-sessmgr02 In this Journal, Kelsey S. Dickson, Jeffery A Ciesla and Kate Zelic set out to test their hypotheses that "greater levels of executive dysfunction will be associated with higher levels of depressive symptomatology."  Specifically, the executive functions that they were watching were set-shifting, inhibition, monitoring and preservation.  They had a secondary hypothesis as well: "higher levels of executive dysfunction will also be associated with higher levels of rumination. As a secondary goal of this study, we examined the mediating effects of rumination on the relationship between EF and depression....however, it is also possible that EF may serve to mediate the relationship between rumination and depression." They sampled 86 high school students, ages 16-18, and had them take several computer administe...

Link to article: file:///Users/matt/Downloads/Blakemore_et_al-2006-Journal_of_Child_Psychology_and_Psychiatry.pdf This article focuses on the advent of fMRI technology and its contributions to the advancement of this relatively new method of study.  Previously, adolescent brain development was only able to be studied by way of animal testing and observing dead bodies.  fMRI has been around long enough now that the same subjects, in large quantity, have been tracked for over 20 years, providing us with a more cohesive picture of brain development throughout various stages of growth (childhood, adolescence, adulthood). This article, like others, makes a strong case for integrating more of our recent findings on adolescent development into our legal system.  Our legal system tends to want to to make an oversimplified, liner means of discipline when dealing with adolescents, whereas fMRI studying is hi lighting sophisticated, nuanced variance in adolescent behavior that...