Faculty Bibliography

This article reports on the use of narrative therapy ideas and practices in working with families that are homeless in a shelter-based, multiple-family discussion group program called Fresh Start for Families. It begins with a review of the challenges facing homeless families. It then briefly describes the collaborative methods used to develop the program. It then describes a range of practices and activities that provide opportunities for families to be witnessed in telling their stories of challenge and coping, to help and be helped by other families experiencing similar challenges, to reconnect and strengthen a positive sense of family identity while externalizing the constraining, stigmatizing descriptions associated with homelessness, and to envision and take steps towards their preferred futures.

The nervous system must provide a mechanism for very precise discrimination of differing patterns of activity, yet at the same time, there must be a mechanism for generalization to prevent all experiences from being independent and novel. Pattern separation and completion by cortical circuits contribute to these processes, respectively. Based on theoretical and computational models of the piriform cortex and experimental designs developed for hippocampal spatial memory, we provide evidence for pattern separation and completion in the olfactory system and demonstrate the predictive power of these two processes for behavioral odor perception

RATIONALE: Psychostimulants, such as yohimbine and amphetamine, can enhance learning and memory. Extinction of conditioned fear involves new learning, so we asked whether psychostimulants could enhance this learning. Previous work suggests that yohimbine facilitates extinction, using freezing as a fear measure. However, psychostimulant-induced alterations in locomotion can confound freezing measurements. Furthermore, the effects of amphetamine on fear extinction have never been examined. OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the effectiveness of yohimbine and amphetamine in enhancing fear extinction. In addition to freezing, we measured bar-press suppression, which is less sensitive to changes in locomotion. We asked: Do psychostimulants reduce fear during extinction training when drug is present? Does learning extinction with psychostimulants result in better extinction retention? MATERIALS AND METHODS: Rats received fear conditioning on day 1 followed by partial extinction training on days 2 and 3. Yohimbine (1.0, 2.0, or 5.0 mg/kg, i.p.), amphetamine (1.0 mg/kg, i.p.), or vehicle were injected prior to extinction on day 2. RESULTS: Yohimbine dose-dependently reduced freezing during extinction training on day 2, whereas bar-press suppression was reduced at the highest dose only. When tested drug-free, yohimbine-treated rats showed equivalent levels of freezing and suppression to controls. Amphetamine also decreased freezing during extinction, but did not decrease suppression. During the drug-free test, there was no difference between amphetamine-treated rats and controls in either measure. CONCLUSIONS: Although yohimbine and amphetamine are capable of decreasing freezing, neither drug strengthened retention of fear extinction. Based on these rodent findings, psychostimulants may not be suitable adjuncts to extinction-based therapies for the treatment of anxiety disorders.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: To examine the neurophysiological basis for the pronounced differences in hyperactivity and impulsiveness that distinguish the predominantly inattentive type of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD-PI) from the combined type of the disorder (ADHD-C). METHODS: Event-related brain responses to a go/no-go test of inhibitory control were measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 11 children with ADHD-C and 9 children with ADHD-PI, aged 7 to 13 years, who were matched for age, sex, and intelligence. RESULTS: There were no significant group differences in task performance. Children with ADHD-C and ADHD-PI activated overlapping regions of right inferior frontal gyrus, right superior temporal lobe, and left inferior parietal lobe during inhibitory control. However, the magnitude of the activation in the temporal and parietal regions, as well as in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus, was greater in children with ADHD-PI than those with ADHD-C. Conversely, children with ADHD-C activated bilateral medial occipital lobe to a greater extent than children with ADHD-PI. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide preliminary evidence that phenotypic differences between the ADHD-C and ADHD-PI subtypes are associated with differential activation of regions that have previously been implicated in the pathophysiology of ADHD and are thought to mediate executive and attentional processes.

Parent cultural adaptation and preschool behavioral and socioemotional functioning were examined in a community sample of urban families from diverse cultural backgrounds. Participants were 130 families of children (mean age = 4.1 years) attending eight public Pre-Kindergarten programs in urban communities. Parents completed a measure of cultural adaptation that taps into acculturation and enculturation, and teachers reported on children's externalizing problems, internalizing problems and adaptive behavior in the classroom. Parents' ethnic identity was a significant predictor of children's functioning. The retention of parents' culture of origin and specific aspects of acculturation are related to positive outcomes in a sample of culturally diverse families of preschoolers living in urban communities. Bicultural parents (those with high ethnic and US American identity) had children with lower levels of internalizing problems and higher levels of adaptive behavior relative to parents who were not bicultural. Implications for enhancing positive child outcomes through the promotion of parental ethnic identity are discussed

This study examined the stability of maternal punitive/high-power discipline (PD) and inductive/authoritative discipline (ID) over the second and third years of life and the effect of maternal discipline on quality of mother-child interactions. Data from a longitudinal sample with 179 mother-toddler dyads were analyzed, and selected factors (i.e., child sex, temperament) that might moderate the association between maternal discipline and quality of mother-child interactions were also examined. Maternal discipline, quality of mother-child interactions, and temperamental moderators were measured at 16-18 months (Time 1) and 34-37 months (Time 2). Results showed that the stability of maternal use of discipline strategies over the toddler years was moderate. Lower maternal use of PD, higher maternal use of ID, and higher preference/reliance on ID (relative to PD) were associated with higher quality of mother-child interactions. Moderation effects of child temperament were also found. High ID and PD were associated with low quality of mother-child relationships in non-temperamentally difficult children but not in temperamentally difficult children.

Segmentation of target odorants from background odorants is a fundamental computational requirement for the olfactory system and is thought to be behaviorally mediated by olfactory habituation memory. Data from our laboratory have shown that odor-specific adaptation in piriform neurons, mediated at least partially by synaptic adaptation between the olfactory bulb outputs and piriform cortex pyramidal cells, is highly odor specific, while that observed at the synaptic level is specific only to certain odor features. Behavioral data show that odor habituation memory at short time constants corresponding to synaptic adaptation is also highly odor specific and is blocked by the same pharmacological agents as synaptic adaptation. Using previously developed computational models of the olfactory system we show here how synaptic adaptation and potentiation interact to create the observed specificity of response adaptation. The model analyzes the mechanisms underlying the odor specificity of habituation, the dependence on functioning cholinergic modulation, and makes predictions about connectivity to and within the piriform neural network. Predictions made by the model for the role of cholinergic modulation are supported by behavioral results