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Validity of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire Form E (16 PF-E) experimental norms for adults with mental retardation was evaluated by comparing 16 PF-E responses of mentally retarded adults with staff ratings. Three primary scales (i.e., A, C, and G) received tenuous support. No support was found for the remaining 13 primary scales.
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Serological studies revealed that toxoplasmosis has world wide distribution. Although the infection by Toxoplasma gondii is widely prevalent in humans and animals, the disease is uncommon and most of the acquired infections are asymptomatic. The important aspect of this parasitic infection is the probable danger of congenital transmission and its severe effects on the fetus. There have been many reports about the prevalence of anti-T. gondii antibody among different groups of people in Iran; however the epidemiological data in intellectual disability (ID) persons are rare. This study was performed to evaluate the seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis among the inhabitants of rehabilitation centers of northern Iran. A total of 336 serum samples (161 males, 175 females) were examined for the IgG antibodies by indirect immunofluorescense technique. First of all, 1:50 titer dilution was tested, in the cases of positive result, further dilutions (1:100, 1:200, 1:400, 1:800, 1:1600, and 1:3200) were prepared and the last dilution was recorded. Among 336 sera, 77.4% showed seropositivity by IFAT. The positive rates of males and females were 77.6% (125/161) and 80% (140/175), respectively. However, there were no significant differences between sexes. Comparing the age groups, the highest seropositive rate showed in 19 or higher, and their rates had a tendency to increase with age. Prevalence of the infection in 10 rehabilitation centers was not significant either. Nevertheless, our data (77.4%) in rehabilitation centers in northern Iran suggest that infection is the same as in many other reports in normal population in this area, therefore toxoplasmosis is not a major problem in rehabilitation centers of this geographical area.
Sleep problems are common in children with severe learning difficulties. Children with sleep problems are reported to have more behaviour problems, but daytime challenging behaviour has not been examined specifically. The current study was concerned with associations between sleep problems and challenging behaviour, as well as describing other clinical features of the childrens' sleep, as reported by parents. All children in the series showed some form of sleep disturbance, with settling problems, night waking and early waking in 44% of the sample. Children with sleep problems showed significantly more types of challenging behaviour and challenging behaviour of a greater severity than children without sleep problems, resulting in management difficulties for carers throughout the 24-h period. Reasons for this association and suggestions for intervention are discussed.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made a number of recent rulings in regard to the death penalty that will likely have the effect of increasing the use of psychiatry during the trial and sentencing process in capital cases. Any such changes are bound to increase the number of ethical dilemmas faced by psychiatrists involved in such work. The rulings affecting psychiatry include: (1) The Eighth Amendment forbids the execution of persons who are mentally incompetent in regard to their ability to appreciate the reasons for punishment. (2) A mentally-ill prisoner may be forcibly given neuroleptics if he presents a danger to himself or others. (3) Forced medication may not be used during the trial and sentencing phase if it has the potential to change the defendant's demeanor significantly enough to affect his defense. (4) Aggravating psychological factors affecting a convictee may be balanced against mitigating factors in considering whether death sentence should be imposed. (5) The psychosocial impact of the crime upon the victim's family may be presented during the sentencing phase as factors relevant to sentencing. (6) Adolescents and retarded individuals are not immune from the death penalty simply by virtue of their age or level of intelligence.
The Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) has been proposed as an efficient questionnaire for identifying the source of reinforcement for an individual's self-injurious behavior (SIB). A previous reliability analysis of the MAS (Durand & Crimmins, 1988) reported interrater correlation coefficients ranging from .66 to .92, based on a comparison of responses provided by classroom teachers. In this study, the reliability of the MAS was reexamined with two independent groups of developmentally disabled individuals who exhibited SIB (N = 55). For the institutional sample (n = 39), the MAS was given to two staff members (a supervisor and therapy aide) who work with the individual daily. For the school sample (n = 16), the MAS was given to the teacher and teacher's aide who taught the student. The correlational analyses completed by Durand and Crimmins (1988) were repeated; in addition, a more precise analysis of interrater reliability was calculated based on the actual number of scoring agreements between the two raters. Results showed that only 16 of the 55 raters agreed on the category of reinforcement maintaining their client's or student's SIB, that only 15% of the correlation coefficients obtained were above .80, and that none of the reliability scores based on percent agreement between raters was above 80%.
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Angelman syndrome (AS) is a rare congenital disorder characterized by impairments in intellectual, neurological and motor functioning and a postulated behavioral profile. This study compared behavioral characteristics of 62 individuals with genetically confirmed AS and 29 individuals with presumed AS from clinical features, with a control group of young persons with intellectual disability (ID) derived from an Australian epidemiological register. Twelve behavioral items from the developmental behavior checklist (DBC) were used for this comparison. The groups were matched for chronological age, gender, and level of ID. In the AS group, significant differences were found for 10 behaviors, with poor attention span and impulsivity being less common, and overactivity/restlessness, chewing or mouthing objects, eating non-food items, gorging food, food fads, fascination for water, hand flapping and sleep disturbance being more common. Interestingly, there was no difference in prevalence of unprovoked laughter. Comparison of the results of the genetically confirmed with the genetically unconfirmed AS cases showed no significant differences between individual behavior prevalence. These findings show that a "behavioral phenotype" of AS can be distinguished from others of similar level of ID, but it is different from that hitherto published. Abnormal food related behaviors, hyperactivity, fascination for water, hand flapping, and sleep disturbance should be included in a "behavioral phenotype" for AS. Apart from hyperactivity, "ADHD-type" behaviors are not more characteristic of AS than in ID generally. Therefore, the Consensus Criteria for the diagnosis of AS need to be reviewed.
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) have a predisposition to leukaemia and testicular cancer, but data on the incidence of cancers are yet sparse. A cohort of 3,581 persons with DS was identified from a National Registry of Finnish persons with intellectual disability collected between 1978 and 1986 and followed-up for cancer incidence until 2002. Standardised incidence ratios (SIRs) were defined as ratios of observed number of cancer cases to those expected from the national cancer incidence rates, by age and sex. The overall cancer risk was equal to that of the general population, but a significantly high risk of leukaemia (SIR 10.5, CI 95% 6.6-15.8) and testicular cancer (SIR4.8, CI 95% 1.8-10.4) was found.
Ensuring that people with an intellectual disability have normative levels of life satisfaction is increasingly considered a worthy goal for service providers. This review concerns the determinants of such satisfaction and embeds this literature within the Homeostatic Theory of Subjective Well-Being. This posits that life satisfaction is under considerable endogenous control and, as a consequence, does not normally vary in sympathy with changes in the external environment. This situation changes, however, if the environment is sufficiently aversive to defeat such homeostatic control. Under these conditions the circumstances of living correlate with life satisfaction as they wrest control away from the homeostatic system. One important implication is that the measure of life satisfaction may or may not be a sensitive indicator for changes in service provision, depending on the functional status of the homeostatic system. MRDD Research Reviews 7:99-104, 2001. (c) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
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The initial scientification of psychiatry after the European discovery of psychotropic drugs via psychopharmacology and biological psychiatry has gradually ended in an impasse. As a result of at least four developments, psychiatry is re-orientating in a more dimensional and functional direction in order to adapt to the progress in the neurosciences. Rigid adherence to nosological systems should be replaced by a careful observation and description of psychopathology as well as a search for relevant psychological dysfunctions and their putative pathophysiological basis. Psychotropics have to be developed that do not suppress symptoms but promote potentially intact functions. Emphasis should be given to the brain mechanisms that are involved in habit formation and chronicity. Modern genetics will drive the discipline towards early intervention and prevention and will elucidate the relations between genetic disorders and the behavioural phenotype. The basis, however, remains clinical observation, dynamically reshaped by neuroscience.
This paper investigates whether a measure of adaptive behavior, which has been developed and validated in western countries, could be successfully adapted to a nonwestern country, Indonesia. The purposes of the study were to (a) delineate procedures for cross-cultural adaptation and validation of adaptive behavior measurement, (b) create an operational version of an instrument in an Indonesian setting, and (c) investigate the validity of the resultant instrument by studying whether it had the same psychometric properties as its United States counterpart. The results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of the methodology employed for ascertaining the worth of any operationalizations of constructs and themes borrowed from other cultures that will form the basis for educational program development and individual pupil assessment.
We examined the occurrence and characteristics of self-stimulatory behaviors in 10 nonhandicapped children and 5 children with developmental delays. Each child with a developmental delay was matched with two normal comparison children, one for chronological age and the other for mental age. The subjects were videotaped in four everyday settings. It was found that few differences existed between the children with developmental delays and their age-matched pairs in the percentage of time they engaged in self-stimulatory behavior, the variety of self-stimulatory behavior, how fast or slowly a behavior was preformed, or the degree of perseveration of each of the behaviors. However, the children with developmental delays and their mental age matches displayed higher levels of obvious and gross motor behavior than the chronological age matches, and the children with developmental delays were more likely to be visually oriented towards their behavior than their age-matched pairs. A measure of judged bizarreness of various self-stimulatory behaviors indicated that obvious gross motor behaviors received the highest bizarreness ratings.
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