Neuropsychology Newsroom
Check out these findings, conversations, resources, and newsletters to learn more.
Provider Publications
Crys Rivers, Ph.D., J.D.
Rivers, C.T., and Phillips, W. (2022). Psychological Systems Perspectives on Resilience. In C. Markey and H.S. Friedman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Mental Health (Vol. 5). Riverside, CA: Academic Press.
Infurna F.J., Rivers C.T., Reich J., Zautra A.J. (2015) Childhood Trauma and Personal Mastery: Their Influence on Emotional Reactivity to Everyday Events in a Community Sample of Middle-Aged Adults. PLoS ONE
Davis, M.C., Mun, C., Kotari, D., Moore, S., Rivers, C., Thummala, K., Weyrich, G. (2018). The Nature and Therapeutic Implications of Pain-Affect Dynamics. In P. Karoly & G. Crombez (Eds.), Motivational Perspectives on Chronic Pain: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York, NY: Oxford Press.
Kent, M., Rivers, C.T., & Wrenn, G. (2015). Goal-Directed Resilience in Training (GRIT): A Biopsychosocial Model of Self-Regulation, Executive Functions, and Personal Growth (Eudaimonia) in Evocative Contexts of PTSD, Obesity, and Chronic Pain. Behavioral Sciences, 5(2), 264–304.
FALL 2022
Did You Know that Patients Sometimes Feign ADHD?
Yes, duh! A simple 30 second Google Search can yield a multitude of resources, from what symptoms to report to what behaviors to display, in order to feign ADHD.
While knowing that patients sometime feign ADHD is an obvious statement, knowing how to differentiate who has the actual disorder from those with a future in acting is a different story. In neuropsychology, embedded and stand-alone measures of validity as well as consistency analyses of data are used to determine if symptoms are being feigned or if poor effort is impacting the data collected. While these tasks may be overly laborious for brief assessments, they are integral components of a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation.
Primary Snoring in School-Aged Children: Neurobehavioral Outcomes
Hagström and colleagues examined neurobehavioral outcomes like behavioral problems, attentional problems, and neurocognitive functioning in children with primary snoring compared to non-snoring peers.
The researchers found that parents reported more daytime sleepiness for children with primary snoring than their non-snoring peers. Increased daytime sleepiness and snoring time were consistently associated with greater behavioral and attentional problems. The group with primary snoring had significantly more reported symptoms like anxiousness and depression in addition to the attention problems (see Figure 1). However, neuropsychological testing did not result in significant group differences in cognitive domains. Thus, children with primary snoring are at a greater risk for experiencing problems with behavior and attention but not for cognitive impairment.
What if Your Student Athlete has an Abnormal Baseline Preseason Concussion Test Score?
The short answer is that it’s normal to have an abnormal score on preseason sport-related concussion testing. While this is a well-known concept in adult neuropsychological theory, Watson and colleagues tackled this concept in student athlete baseline evaluations.
Watson found that more than a third of the participants had one score of 1.5 standard deviations below the mean. This is juxtaposed by the significant rarity of multiple abnormal scores clustered in a particular cognitive domain which would indicate true abnormal functioning. The take home is everyone gets to whiff the ball occasionally in baseline cognitive testing.
SPRING 2021
Did You Know that Neuropsychologists No Longer Diagnose Dementia? Say What?
In the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) from the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the definition of a neurocognitive disorder was introduced. This disorder is further classified into Major or Mild neurocognitive disorder.
The Major Neurocognitive Disorder diagnosis now replaces the term "dementia" which roughly means that the patient is having significant changes in thinking that impact daily activities. An etiology for those changes is identified when possible. For example, if the investigated neuropsychological profile is commensurate with the known clinical presentation of an Alzheimer’s pathology, then the diagnosis would be Major Neurocognitive Disorder due to probable Alzheimer’s disease, formerly known as Alzheimer’s dementia.
Is Higher Education Truly Protective from Alzheimer’s Disease?
The current trend in research is identifying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology in midlife. While this trend comes with a whole host of ethical questions and remains a research, and not clinical, construct, it begs the ultimate question of how to stave off dementia.
Prevailing thought is that higher educational attainment is protective against AD. What we are learning, however, is that it is in fact not protective against AD but rather the clinical syndrome of dementia. AD represents the biomechanisms thought to be responsible for the most common form of dementia. Dementia is the condition of changes in thinking.
So how does higher education play into this? The assumption is that higher education is correlated to a higher number of neural pathways.
Thus, neural recruitment can more easily occur when presented with a difficult task. What that means is those with higher education will perform better on tasks longer than lower educated counterparts even with the same level of AD pathology. You cannot, however, outrun it. While performance may be maintained longer, neural recruitment is limited once the disease progresses. The cognitive difficulties make a precipitous decline, eventually meeting those in the lower education group.
Stern, Y. (2020, Oct. 16). How can cognitive reserve promote cognitive and neurobehavioral health? [Conference session]. Promoting Neurobehavioral & Cognitive Health: 40th National Academy of Neuropsychology Annual Conference 2020, Virtual.
Segregation and the Effects on IQ Rates of African Americans in the South
Dr. Lisa Barnes is a prominent researcher at Rush University studying Alzheimer’s disease in African American populations. She recently presented at the National Academy of Neuropsychology conference with the most recent findings from her studies.
An interesting post hoc analysis that she mentioned was the exploration of why African Americans traditionally score lower on IQ tests than their white counterparts. While many theories suggest inherit bias with test development, Barnes found a possible alternative variable.
When gathering history from her African American participants that received their primary schooling in the South, it was asked if the school was segregated or desegregated. For the participants of desegregated schools, the IQ gap remained; for participants from segregated schools, there was NOT a significant difference in IQ performance. It can be extrapolated that the constant stress of racist interactions encountered daily in early education is a moderating variable in IQ development.
Barnes, L. (2020, Oct. 14). Risk and protective factors of cognitive aging in older African Americans [Conference session]. Promoting Neurobehavioral & Cognitive Health: 40th National Academy of Neuropsychology Annual Conference 2020, Virtual.
WINTER 2016
Early Diagnosis & Intervention of Dyslexia Can Narrow Achievement Gap
According to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis and Yale University, if we can identify children having dyslexia (reading disorder) as early as first grade, we can narrow or perhaps even close the achievement gap.
According to their study, it is no longer acceptable to wait until a child is older to diagnose them as having dyslexia, for example after third grade.
“If the persistent achievement gap between dyslexia and typical readers is to be narrowed, or even closed, reading interventions must be implemented early, when children are still developing the basic foundation for reading acquisition” says Emilio Ferrer, a psychology professor at University of California-Davis.
University of California - Davis. "Early intervention in dyslexia can narrow achievement gap: Intervention should begin in first grade, or earlier."ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2 November 2015.<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151102184216.htm>.
Teasing Apart Depression Subtypes in Traumatic Brain Injury
Approximately half of individuals who experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI) experience depression within a year. Those with TBI and depression are prone to poorer recovery, reductions in cognitive performance, greater functional disability, increased suicide attempts and other social difficulties. Since depression symptoms vary greatly, teasing apart a diagnosis in the context of traumatic brain injury is often difficult.
Participants were assessed using MRI and emotional and cognitive measures. Individuals with depressive symptoms that were cognitive in nature, such as guilt, worthlessness, and self-dislike, showed reduced amygdala connectivity with prefrontal cortices.
This is contrasted to individuals with depressive symptoms that are affective in nature, such as crying, loss of pleasure and loss of interest, who showed reduced amygdala connectivity with the brain regions of salience (e.g., insula), attention (e.g., parietal lobes), and visual networks.
Understanding these differences is essential in treating patients with TBI and depression, as different cognitive rehabilitation strategies can be used in the varied subtypes.
Center for Brain Health. "Brain imaging reveals possible depression signature in traumatic brain injury." ScienceDaily.ScienceDaily, 5 November 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151105143536.htm>.
Measuring Beta Amyloid: Implications in Alzheimer's Disease
Researchers at Gothenburg University in Sweden have developed a new way to measure beta amyloid in spinal fluid. Beta amyloid is a protein found in our brain and in healthy people is transported to the spinal fluid and blood. In theory, in someone with Alzheimer’s disease, the beta amyloids stay in the brain where they build up and damage the synapses.
The researchers were able to measure the amount of beta amyloid in spinal fluid, noting abnormalities ten to thirty years before cognitive and behavioral symptoms emerge in Alzheimer's disease. This new research can help in the development of drugs that will attack the beta amyloids building up in the brain.
University of Gothenburg. "Swedish diagnostic method for Alzheimer's becomes international standard." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2November 2015. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151102130138.htm>.