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Biomedical subjects

G G Noam

Publications and source records attributed to G G Noam.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Paths of adolescent ego development: links with family life and individual adjustment.

In broad strokes, we have reviewed family contexts and adjustment of adolescent ego development. We concluded with group portraits, the salient family and individual characteristics of adolescents who followed six paths of ego development. There are strong differences in development--the profound arrests and the dramatic progressions. Although these composite pictures provide us with clearer ideas about each of the paths, we do not yet have a detailed understanding of how adolescents following the varied paths experience the world and relate in their families. Certain questions can only be pursued with this information. For instance, are there ways that parents of the steady conformist adolescents speak and behave that restrain their sons' and daughters' separation from the family? Or do the profoundly arrested teenagers provoke their parents to be less encouraging of their differences from other family members? These questions, touching on complex interactions flowing between parents and adolescents, require a closer look inside the families of teenagers following these paths of arrest and advance. In a work soon to be published, we listen closely to the voices of 13 adolescents and their parents, in solo and while together as a family. These narratives convey the message that paths of individual development are embedded within the intricate matrix of family relationships. The teenagers and their families closely and often poignantly illustrate the ways in which adolescents and parents handle the central dilemma posed during this phase of the life cycle: how to separate from the family and reaffirm one's place within it.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1989

Comparison of DISC with clinicians' DSM-III diagnoses in psychiatric inpatients.

A sample of 163 children and adolescents, consecutively admitted to a large, private psychiatric teaching hospital, was interviewed using the child version of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC-C). Patients, ages 12 to 16, were interviewed during the first month of admission. Kappa coefficients were obtained from cross-tabulated frequencies of DISC and clinician diagnoses. Agreement between clinical and DISC diagnoses was generally poor across diagnostic categories. In general, when algorithms of a higher threshold were used, the percentage of patients in a particular diagnostic group was closer to the percentage diagnosed by the clinician. Discussion focuses on factors that may contribute to the discrepancy between number and type of diagnoses that the DISC yields compared to those made by the clinicians.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Suicidality and psychopathology in hospitalized children and adolescents.

The present study presents the incidence of suicidality in a group of hospitalized children and adolescents and the relationship between suicidality, forms of psychopathology, and a variety of demographic and family variables. Specific attention is paid to age and gender differences. More than two-thirds of the sample (70%) showed evidence of suicide attempts, threats or ideation. One third attempted suicide at least once prior to or during their admission, and twice as many girls attempted suicide as boys. The majority of suicide attempters were 12 years or older at the time of their first attempt. Drug overdose was the method most frequently used. The suicide attempters and patients without a history of attempts did not differ on demographic and family psychopathology variables. Interestingly, no diagnostic differences were found between suicide attempters and non-suicidal patients. The majority of suicide attempters were diagnosed conduct disorder. Only a third of the attempters were diagnosed as suffering from an affective disorder. We therefore conclude that factors such as impulsivity and anger may contribute significantly to suicidal behavior in children and adolescents.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

Evaluating ego defense mechanisms using clinical interviews: an empirical study of adolescent diabetic and psychiatric patients.

Ego defense mechanisms were studied in three groups of early adolescents: diabetic patients, non-psychotic psychiatric patients, and healthy high school students. Defenses were assessed from ratings of open-ended, in-depth interviews. High levels of denial and low levels of asceticism were found in all three groups. Comparisons between groups indicated that psychiatric patients had a distinctive profile of defense usage, in comparison to adolescents from the other two groups. An independent measure of ego development was positively correlated with the defenses of altruism, intellectualization, and suppression, while it was negatively correlated with acting out, avoidance, denial, displacement, projection, and repression. The findings of substantial differences in defense usage between the psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples, and the size and directions of the correlations with ego development level, lend support to the validity of the defense codes.

Acting Out↗
PubMed1984

Ego development and psychopathology: a study of hospitalized adolescents.

This paper explores the relationship between ego development and psychiatrically relevant behaviors in a group of hospitalized adolescents. Building on Loevinger's model of ego development, we administered the Sentence Completion Test to 114 adolescent girls and boys. To study psychiatric symptoms, Achenbach and Edelbrock's Child Behavior Checklist was used. With these procedures, the Achenbach and Edelbrock factor scores were compared to ego stage using correlational and multiple regression analyses. Findings indicate significant negative correlations with the externalizing and internalizing factors as well as a variety of behavioral subscales. A significant relationship also exists between the total number of symptoms and ego development. Ego development is found to be an important predictor for the externalizing factor and 2 subscales after the background variables of age, sex, and SES are partialed out. Our discussion addresses the question of the relationship between stages and transitions in ego development in relation to psychopathology. In addition, "age-stage dysynchronies" are discussed as ways of understanding psychopathology from a developmental perspective.

Acting Out↗
PubMed1984

Familial contexts of adolescent ego development.

In this paper we describe our newly constructed Constraining and Enabling Coding System (CECS). This scheme was constructed to identify family interactions that are conceptually relevant to adolescent ego development. First, we discuss the theoretical rationale and reliability properties of the codes. We then present results of applying the scales to observations of 61 families, consisting of 2 parents and an adolescent, drawn from matched high school and psychiatric populations. All families are upper and (predominantly) upper-middle class. Each member completed the Loevinger Sentence Completion Test and then participated in a revealed-differences task, using responses to Kohlberg Moral Dilemmas as discussion stimuli. Transcripts of these audiorecorded discussions formed the data base for the family analyses. After controlling for patient status and adolescent age, adolescent and parent ego-development scores still contributed to explained variance in family interactions. Adolescent ego development was positively associated with adolescent enabling behaviors (e.g., problem solving, empathy). In contrast, there were negative correlations between constraining behaviors (e.g., devaluing, withholding) and adolescent ego development. Parental behaviors were significantly associated with (a) parent ego development, and (b) adolescent ego development. The third dimension of our system, discourse change, also showed theoretically expected strong correlations between progressive discourse change and ego development. In our discussion we comment on the importance of now proceeding to sequence analyses in order to explore questions of directionality.

Adolescent↗