EBD Blog

In November of 2005 I covered a report from the British Medical Journal about a study of so-called “dolphin therapy.” In brief, the researchers solicited people with depression to travel to a tropical area where they were promised the opportunity to swim with dolphins. As people arrived, some were diverted into a control group that simply went swimming and others actually got to swim with dolphins. When asked to complete a self-report inventory about depression after a couple of weeks, those who swam with dolphins gave answers showing lower levels of depression than those who did not swim with dolphins. I previously enumerated problems with this study.

Welp, I learned that Eric Nagourney of the New York Times has covered the same study, though less critically, in an article entitled “Therapies: A Dose of Dolphins for Moderate Depression.” Mr. Nagourney noted another concern about the therapy: “Some conservationists, however, frown on swim-with-dolphin programs, contending they are stressful to the animals.”

John Grohol’s Pysch Central blog reprinted part of Mr. Nagourney’s article. Psych Central offered no further analysis of the study.

Intrigued by the spread of the story, I used “dolphin therapy depression ‘British Medical Journal’” as a search term in Google and Yahoo. Whew! It appears this study has legs! There were 1000s of hits (~2400 in Yahoo; ~12000 in Google). To be sure, not all of the hits will link to uncritical reports of the study, but there’s enough buzz clearly hooked to the study that its results will probably become accepted as fact. Sigh.

This seems to me to be another instance of the appeal of a novel therapy causing people to accept results from a study that we might otherwise question strongly. Perhaps I’m being hypercritical…. I sure would like to see the invitation that went to the people who participated in the therapy; it would tell a lot. How were the people recruited? I do not recall that the study documented this clearly. Oh well. The study will be a good example to use in research classes.

Have you ever touched a dolphin? I have and I am not depressed. So there! It must work.

Link to Mr. Nagourney’s article and a link to Psych Central’s entry.

Why are there no posts from me? Easy: I’m busy grading….some future teachers have submitted products and I am reviewing those docs. (Not that anyone other than me asked this question!)

13th Annual Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (CARD) Conference
Inspire Passion Into Action
January 21 – 22, 2006
Renaissance Tampa Hotel International Plaza

http://card-usf.fmhi.usf.edu/

3rd Annual Conference: Addressing Challenging Behavior – National Training
Institute on Effective Practices, Supporting Young Children’s
Social/Emotional Development
March 29 – April 1, 2006
Sheraton Sand Key Resort
Clearwater Beach, Florida

http://www.addressingchallengingbehavior.org/

Prevoiusly I had an entry on use of new tax revenues for mental health services in the southern California (US) area. Now there is another story about funds from the same revenue source prompting me to remark again about the need for sensible use of the funds. According to Niesha Lofing, writing in the Sacramento (CA, US) Bee, the Placer County Health and Human Services agency will receive a large infusion of funds, some from the new tax on high incomes and some from grants. One of the agency’s activities, called Children’s System of Care, is slated to receive some of the funds. Let’s hope that decisions about how to spend the money used for services needed by children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders and their families are based on evidence and reason, not unfounded opinion and runaway theory.

Link to Ms. Lofing’s story.

By studying differences in how their brains function during efforts to imitate emotions, Mirella Dapretto and colleagues have discovered that adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) have no activity in the part of the brain that is employed in many important activities including imitation and language production. The HFA participants can mimic others’ facial expressions, but when they do so, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis is not activated, although it is activated in non-disabled peers.

Notably, activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional ‘mirror neuron system’ may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.

The findings of the study by Ms. Depretto and colleagues align with other findings and theories about autism. The theory about dysfunction in the mirror neuron system in autism is gaining momentum. For example, another group (first author: Lindsay Oberman) has shown that brain waves (mu) that are usually muted when people see, do, or think about performing actions were not muted in individuals with HFA.

As expected, mu wave suppression was recorded in the control subjects both when they moved and when they watched another human move. In other words, their mirror neuron systems acted normally. The mirror neurons of the subjects with autism spectrum disorders, however, responded anomalously – only to their own movement.

The brain region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis has been the focus of studies recently. Scientists have been able to localize functions with increasing precision. Istvan Molnar-Szakacs and colleagues (including Marco Iacoboni, an author on the fMRI autism study, too) aggregated fMRI studies of the IFG and were able to segregate functions in the pars opercularis:

For imitation we found two peaks of activation in the pars opercularis, one in its dorsal sector and the other in its ventral sector. The dorsal sector of the pars opercularis was also activated during action observation, whereas the ventral sector was not. In addition, the pars triangularis was activated during action observation but not during imitation.

I think imitation is terribly critical in learning, making these findings really noteworthy. That the behavioral neurologists are coming up with these sorts of findings is very exciting. I wonder if we will soon see studies parallel to those in reading showing that promoting higher levels of imitation changes the fMRI results. Meanwhile, note that most of these studies are with HFA individuals.

Links to

• The abstract for the study of autism andunderstanding emotions in others
• The abstract for the study of functional segregation
• The news release about the study of EEG activity during imitation and observation.
• Coverage of the Dapretto et al. study by John Bohanon in Science.

Joel Turtel, a self-identified libertarian who advocates for home- and private-schooling and against public schools and taxes and who appears in many right wing venues, has an article challenging the diagnosis of Attention Deficit-Hypactivity Disorder (ADHD). Quoting from two selected experts, Mr. Turtel argues that ADHD symptoms are consequences of boredom and nearly three dozen other conditions (including Learning Disabilities, sleep disorders, iron deficiency, etc.). He reports that public school personnel recommend medications to parents, a practice that would be unprofessional, let alone illegitimate! Here is his recommendation to parents:

Parents, do not fall for the ADHD arguments that some public school authorities are now attempting to foist on you and your children. Although a few children do exhibit extreme “symptoms” of ADHD, for most normal kids ADHD turns out to be a questionable “disease” at best, and a bogus disease at worst. Many public schools now use this alleged ADHD disease as a convenient excuse to pressure parents to give their normal but bored or high-energy children mind-altering drugs.

Parents, do not succumb to the temptation to drug your children with mind-altering drugs because a public-school teacher or school nurse tells you that your child is not “behaving properly” or “paying attention” in class. There are many other ways to deal with children’s “behavior” problems in school besides drugging your children. One of the best ways is to take your children out of public school so they aren’t bored to death sitting in public school classrooms. When children get engrossed in learning in a stimulating homeschool environment, they are far less likely to misbehave.

I happen to agree that schools could be organized and conducted in ways that would reduce many of the problems associated with ADHD. Providing highly engaging, fast-paced lessons which require students to respond frequently and make nuanced changes in their answers based on corresponding changes in the questions teachers ask would surely result in lower levels of attention problems than one would observe in the typical child-centered classroom. (See, for example, the study by D. Carnine of the effects of differing frequencies of teacher questioning on students attention behavior from JABA, 1976). However, I doubt that such environments will eliminate all variance in attention; some children will still have difficulty with attending, inhibiting impulses, changing activities frequently, and so forth. So I can’t altogether buy Mr. Turtel’s faulting of the schools.

I am not advocating prescription of medications. Far from it, I suspect that they are over prescribed. But, I know the literature on them shows clear benefits for many children.

Moreover, I have other problems with Mr. Turtel’s argument. Beyond using only selected authorities, he has ignored a substantial body of knowledge. It would be very interesting to know, for example, how Mr. Turtel would respond to a few of the quite-strong neuropsych studies of ADHD.

Mr. Turtel apparently deposited his article in one or more free content sites, as it has been published on scores of sites. Here’s a link to just one of them. Thanks to Liz Ditz for bringing this to my attention.

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to teach students with Emotional and Behavioral Disoders, it takes a lot. Over on MentorMatters, Mrs. Ris tells of an incident in which a teacher was hit by a student and then about how important it is for teachers to be tough.

Link to the incident and the tough on MentorMatters.