Orchid Kids: The Positives of Intense and Demanding Children

"Themistocles was an unruly boy, and carried on his mad pranks without much restraint. When taken to task for them he said, "The wildest colts make the best horses when they come to be properly trained." - Plutarch (46-120 AD)

Interesting article The Science of Success in Atlantic Monthly:

The first part starts out pretty predictable..."In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults."

The researchers found that behavioral interventions and video feedback to mothers really helped behavior, for instance helping mothers to recognize that their fidgety kids really did enjoy reading books together although they were restless and seemed distractible. But the study also had another level of analysis that highlighted the unexpected greater good in the genetically at-risk kids. When the outcomes of 'at-risk' allele kids were compared to outcomes of 'protective' allele kids, the 'at-risk' ones actually fared better.

"As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles, the Leiden team concluded, really can create not just risk but possibility.

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers..."

Very encouraging finding for families dealing with intense difficult temperament kids (difficult temperaments have been described as intense, negative, and slow to adapt), and bears out with our clinical practice too. Parents of these kids often need a great deal of support - and it is true that some kids are A LOT harder to parent than others. But there is an encouraging light at the end of the tunnel.

The authors argue for a more complex view of understanding 'genetic risk' - certainly when it comes to behavior: "...This new model sugggests that it's a mistake to understand these 'risk' genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts- butthey can also enhance function to favorable contexts."

The story concludes: "The orchid variant of the DRD4 gene, for instance, increases risk of ADHD (a syndrome best characterized COchran and Harpending write, 'by actions that annoy elementary school teachers'). Yet attention restlessness can serve people well in environments that reward sensitivity to new stimuli. The current growth of multitasking, for instance may help select for just such attentional agility."


Eide Neurolearning Blog: Elementary Angst May Still Mean Success

Ipod Music Stimulates Alzheimers and Stroke Patients

Pretty cool finding. Music stimulates the memories and activities of stroke and Alzheimer's patients. From the WSJ:

"Listening to rap and reggae on a borrowed iPod every day has helped Everett Dixon, a 28-year-old stroke victim at Beth Abraham Health Services in Bronx, N.Y., learn to walk and use his hands again...Ann Povodator, an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient in Boynton Beach, Fla., listens to her beloved opera and Yiddish songs every day on an iPod with her home health aide or her daughter when she comes to visit. "We listen for at least a half-hour, and we talk afterwards," says her daughter, Marilyn Povodator. "It seems to touch something deep within her."

Dr. Concetta Tomaino, director of the non-profit organization Institute for Music and Neurologic Function found that "45 patients with mid- to late-stage dementia had one hour of personalized music therapy, three times a week, for 10 months, and improved their scores on a cognitive-function test by 50% on average. One patient in the study recognized his wife for the first time in months."

At right, researchers found that autobiographical music (red) triggered the medial prefrontal cortex, an area relatively spared in Alzheimer's disease. This also jives pretty well with the observation that Alzheimer patients tend to show a 'temporal gradient' for memories (better memory for remote rather than recent events), and the fact that severely aphasic stroke patients may be able to sing though spoken output is virtually nil.

How many people might this help?

Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories
Unlocking memories

Sensory Processing, Postural Sway, Anxiety - Better with Occupational Therapy

Interesting study that shows that the lines between sensory processing, emotional processing, and behavior are continuing to blur. As many parents of a child with significant sensory processing difficulties will tell you, anxiety and emotional dysregulation can be a huge part of what makes sensory processing disorders most difficult. A major reason for this, it is thought, is that sensory systems function to alert the body to danger, so that disordered sensory signals will trigger extreme danger reactions, like fear, anxiety, aggression, and escape.

But now more evidence from the psychological side point out the dangers of anxiety on sensory processing, spatial perception, and balance, informing us about the other side of the loop - sensory processing dysfunction not only makes anxiety worse, but anxiety makes sensory processing worse, so no wonder kids can quickly escalate into a meltdown or complete overload situation.

In the figure above, researchers found with surprise that an otherwise unselected group of children diagnosed with anxiety actually had unrecognized balanced problems that could be measured quantitatively on tests of postural sway. More balance problems were seen if the children had to concentrate on a memory tasks (divided attention), but the greatest imbalance was seen when kids stood on a compliant surface (foam) that required more active balancing, and this imbalance was even more severe when children were asked to stand with eyes closed.

The findings are quite startling, and the raise the question whether we're really treating a lot of cerebellar kids with balance problems with anti-anxiety drugs.

Now various groups have confirmed that spatial difficulties and balance problems are common among anxious people, but an Israeli group have take the observations a step further. In this presentation, researchers found that treating anxious children with balance training (OT) resulted not only improved balance, but also reduced anxiety and higher self-esteem. They also made the observation that commonly used physician screens for balance (standing heel-to-toe or neurological exams of the vestibular system) were not sensitive for detecting problems. The anxious children did complain of more dizziness and motion sickness than their matched controls though.

From an article in Science Daily:

“This is a breakthrough in the field of occupational therapy,” says Dr. Bart...“You can’t treat children with anxiety in a cognitive way because of their immaturity and lack of operational thinking. Working with the body may be the answer."

FYI, sensory processing guru Dr. Lucy Miller also has an article calling for more Translational research in sensory processing disorders in a recent issue of Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Postural Sway and Anxious Children
Impaired spatial learning in pediatric anxiety (abstract only)
Spatial perception problems in individuals with trait anxiety

Lazy Thinkers and Dysrationalia

Pop Quiz:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?


a. Yes
b. No
c. Cannot be determined

(No, the polar bears have nothing to do with Jack, Anne, or George).

What's your answer? If you answered c. Cannot be determined, you're probably one of the 80% who is a lazy thinker, or a 'cognitive miser' as Keith Stanovich proposes in his book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. Excerpt from the Toronto article (Why smart people do stupid things) below:

"... most people have the intelligence if you tell them something like “think logically” or “consider all the possibilities.” But unprompted, they won’t bring their full mental faculties to bear on the problem.

And that’s a major source of dysrationalia, Stanovich says. We are all “cognitive misers” who try to avoid thinking too much. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Thinking is time-consuming, resource intensive and sometimes counterproductive. If the problem at hand is avoiding the charging sabre-toothed tiger, you don’t want to spend more than a split second deciding whether to jump into the river or climb a tree.

So we’ve developed a whole set of heuristics and biases to limit the amount of brainpower we bear on a problem. These techniques provide rough and ready answers that are right a lot of the time – but not always."

The solution is easy (a. Yes) if you take the time to work out the two possibilities re: whether Anne is married or single.

At least at the time this post is being written, the entire Scientific American article can be read: here.

In this older paper by Stanovich, "thinking dispositions" (habits of mind?) (e.g. length of time spent on difficult problems, disposition to weigh new evidence / other opinions vs. a favored belief, etc.) are presented as being very different from the cognitive capacities measured by conventional IQ tests, and this would seem quite true.

Stanovich would like our educational system to spend for effort on teaching (and requiring) more rational thinking, and this seems to be a lofty goal (examples given...more general thinking strategies, scientific thinking, basic statistics). Hey given the magnitude of educational need, it would even be helpful if students were given more hard problems to solve with opportunities to be put into difficult spots so that can examine their assumptions and consider others' opinions and perspectives.

The truth is, some of this concept of being a 'cognitive miser' is part of the dark side of expertise. Expertise strives to categorize seemingly random choices, simplifying and speeding downstream decisions. But of course it can result in mistakes like the Jack-Anne-George dilemma.

I liked coming across this article because like jolt of coffee, it woke me up a bit about mistakes I can make by thinking too quickly.

What I am not so sure about is the Dysrationalist discussants might be placing too much importance on rationality as the ultimate guide to decision-making. What about moral philosophy in decision-making for instance? Last night as an exercise in philosophy we watched 'Fountainhead' as a family, and couldn't help but wondering whether uber-rationalism can also lead smart people to dumb conclusions.

Why smart people do stupid things
Rationality, Intelligence, and Levels of Analysis pdf
Lazy polar bear