Thesis (Ph.D.(Educational Psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2314. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-134).

Thesis (M.Ed.(Educational Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Louisville, 2009. / Department of Communication. Vita. "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62).

Thesis (M.Psych. Ed.) - University of Queensland, 2006. / Includes bibliography.

M.A. (Clinical Psychology) / The purpose of this study was to determine whether children who are diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), and Geschwind's syndrome, show a tendency to greater allergic responsivity manifesting in a greater sensitivity to specific foods than a control group. In order to test out these predictions, it had to be assessed whether these children displayed differential sensitivity to the food groups of sugar, dairy products and artificial flavouring and colouring. It was also necessary to establish whether these children will show a decrease in levels of activity contingent upon withdrawal of a foodstuff to which a differential sensitivity has been demonstrated. The subjects participating in this study were rated on a Conners Rating Scale to assess the degree of hyperactive behaviour, by both parents and teachers over a six week period. The overall pattern of results indicated that children with a combined diagnosis of ADHD and Geschwind's syndrome would show a greater behavioural responsivity to certain foodstuffs, and contingent upon their withdrawal, show a significant decrease in hyperactive behaviour. It is proposed that the study be repeated utilising a larger sample.

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD) is not a new phenomenon. Researchers have studied children with restless, inattentive and impulsive types of behaviours for over one hundred years. Although the primary distress of AD/HD falls mainly on the child’s shoulders, all family members experience the disorder’s negative effects. While the challenges that families have to face are many, families seem to have the ability to “bounce back” (i.e., they have resilience). There has been limited research to date focusing on the resiliency of families living with children diagnosed with AD/HD. Research on the construct of resilience, and more specifically, family resilience has surged in recent times. However, South African research on family resilience is limited. This study aimed to explore and describe the factors that facilitate adjustment and adaptation in families after a child has been clinically diagnosed with AD/HD. The Resiliency Model of Family Stress, Adjustment and Adaptation, developed by McCubbin and McCubbin (2001) served as a framework to conceptualize the families’ adjustment and adaptation processes. Non-probability purposive sampling was used in order to gain participants for the study. Twenty-two families participated in this study, providing a total of 44 participants. Participants consisted of the caregivers of a family living with a child diagnosed with AD/HD, between the ages of seven and 12. The study was triangular in nature, with an exploratory, descriptive approach. A biographical questionnaire with an open-ended question was used in conjunction with seven other questionnaires to gather data. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the biographical information. Quantitative data were analyzed by means of correlation and regression analysis, and content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data obtained from the biographical questionnaire. The results of the quantitative analysis indicated six significant positive correlations with the FACI8. These variables were relative and friend support, social support, problem solving and behavioural strategies, family hardiness, family problem-solving communication and family time and routines. The results of the qualitative analysis revealed that social support, adherence to a treatment regime, information and knowledge about AD/HD, a supportive family unit, the caregiver’s acceptance of the disorder as well as communication were the most important strength factors identified. The findings of the research could assist parents in managing their children diagnosed with AD/HD more effectively and has helped create further insight into what resiliency areas they could improve upon. Furthermore, this study could be used as a stepping stone for future research on resilience in families living with a pervasive psychological disorder and will contribute to the broader context of family resilience research in the South African context.

Memory and metamemory were examined in 30 hyperactive and 30 nonhyperactive children matched on age, grade, and IQ (as measured by the Vocabulary and the Block Design subtests of the WISC-R), within the context of a broad range of tasks. The five tasks investigated in this study were: (a) a prospective memory task, (b) a feeling-of-knowing task, a visual retention task, (c) a word generation task, (d) and (e) an object span and recall task. Previous research has demonstrated considerable variability in the performance of hyperactive children on memory tasks. They have been shown to perform as well as normal children on tasks of cued recall, paired associates for meaningful words, and on tests of recognition memory. They are distinguished from normal children by their poor performance on tasks of uncued recall, paired associates learning for semantically unrelated words, and in addition, often display performance decrements when task demands increase. The results of this study suggest that hyperactive children are less efficient in metamemory knowledge and skills than normal children. These findings are consistent with the proposal that the difficulties hyperactive children demonstrate on memory tasks may result from a deficiency in their ability to efficiently engage in metamemory processes. The hyperactive children in this study generally had more difficulty than the control children with recall on all the tasks. These included tests of both verbal and nonverbal memory, short and long-term memory, and prospective remembering. Further, they did not derive a memorial benefit, as the control subjects did, when generating their own recall items, or when recalling visual stimuli that could be more easily verbally encoded than others. The hyperactive subjects demonstrated their recall abilities by performing as well as the normal subjects on the recall of read words in the word generation task, and on the recall of the low and medium level of labelability items in the visual retention task. Also, the recall performance of the hyperactive subjects differed significantly between a no-strategy and a provided strategy condition on the prospective memory task. Moreover, there were no group differences on the recognition memory test of the feeling-of-knowing task. The results of this study are consistent with the previous investigations of memory performance in hyperactive children. The present findings further extend the past research by demonstrating selective memory deficits in the hyperactive subjects that are consistent with deficits in metamemory abilities. The proposition that metamemory skills are implicated in the difficulties that the hyperactive children demonstrated in this study is further supported by the difficulty they experienced in describing how they remembered the task items. The hyperactive subjects had more difficulty than the control subjects when attempting to describe a strategy that they used to aid recall. The strategies they described, relative to the control subjects, tended to be vague and poorly defined. These findings suggest that there may be both qualitative and quantitative differences in the way in which hyperactive and normal children use strategies. In summary, the findings of this study suggest that hyperactive children, relative to normal children, seem to be deficient in both their metamemory knowledge and the ability to monitor and control their memory performance. Questions addressing whether these children cannot or do not employ these skills were introduced. The clinical implications of the findings were considered and recommendations were made for future research. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

This study investigated the effects of task pacing on the cognitive performance of ADD/WO (n=8), ADD/H (n=l0), and normal control (n=l2) children on a continuous processing task (CPT). In the CPT, each child was exposed to fast (500ms), medium (l0O0ms), slow (2000mS), and self-paced conditions. Performance was measured as number of omission errors, number of commission errors, number of specific types of commission errors, reaction time, and rate of self-pacing. The ADD/H group had a significantly slower mean RT than the normal control group. However, groups did not differ on omission or commission errors, and there were no group by pacing condition or group by (non-target) sequence interactions. Reasons for the appearance of group differences on mean RT without group differences on accuracy are discussed in terms of subject and task characteristics. / Master of Science

This study involved 77 couples consisting of mothers and fathers of ADHD children from intact, two-parent families. All ADHD children were between 6 and 16 years old and had been evaluated by a Licensed Practicing Psychologist or Medical Doctor. All mothers and fathers completed three questionnaires - the Conners Parent Rating Scales-48 (Conners, 1973), the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976), and a demographic questionnaire. For purposes of this study, Bell's (1981) child effects model was used as a basis for research. This model, as opposed to an adult effects model, supports the thesis that children contribute to their own socialization by influencing the behavior of their caretakers. Recent research suggests that in most families of ADHD children, the primary contributors to parent-child interactive stress appear to emanate from child characteristics, with parental and environmental characteristics playing an important but secondary role (Barkley, 1981a, 1989; Bell & Harper, 1977; Mash & Johnson, 1990; Schachar et al., 1987). The literature supports the investigation of the relationship between interparent agreement on the perceptions of their ADHD children's behavior and self reports of marital satisfaction with regards to the variables of age of the child, gender of the child, severity of the child's behavior, and gender of the parent. As predicted, moderate relationships were found between interparent agreement on child behavior and mothers' and fathers' reports of marital satisfaction, although somewhat higher for mothers. The predicted effects of age of the child and rated severity of child behavior were not supported. When assessing the effec~s of gender of the child, parents of ADHD girls reported slightly more agreement and higher marital satisfaction than parents of ADHD boys. Examination of the predicted differences between mothers and fathers showed that mothers perceived their ADHD children's behavior as slightly more severe and reported slightly lower marital satisfaction than did fathers of ADHD children. / Ph. D.