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The behavioral, self-evaluative, and attributional responses of 120 boys with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and 65 control boys to social success and failure were examined using a dyadic, laboratory get-acquainted task employing child confederates. Objective coders rated boys with ADHD as less socially effective than controls in their interactions, but also as less frustrated and helpless. In terms of self-evaluations, ADHD boys overwhelmingly rated their own performance more favorably than did controls and in some instances, these differences were more apparent following failure. The attributional pattern of ADHD and control boys differed in that ADHD boys were more likely than controls to attribute success to external, uncontrollable factors such as task ease and being lucky; controls, on the other hand, were more likely than ADHD boys to attribute initial failure to not having tried hard enough. Results are discussed in the context of existing literature documenting a positive illusory bias in ADHD boys' self-perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developmental and clinical differences in children's on-line understanding of ongoing social events were examined. Boys with (n = 38) and without (n = 41) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were compared. Prior social schemes and integrative processes were hypothesized to influence children's representation of incoming social cues. Younger children and children with ADHD were expected to differ from older children and children without ADHD, respectively, in what they encoded and how they organized the encoded information. Differences in on-line representation were postulated to underlie differences in children's recall and social reasoning. Children's prior social schemes, looking time and on-line verbal protocols, recall, and social reasoning were assessed. Younger boys and ADHD boys showed less integrated on-line representations, accounting for poorer recall and reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming that children are goal-oriented, it is suggested that their thoughts are related to two components--agency and pathways. Agency thoughts reflect the perception that children can initiate and sustain action toward a desired goal; pathways thoughts reflect the children's perceived capability to produce routes to those goals. Hope reflects the combination of agentic and pathways thinking toward goals. A six-item dispositional self-report index called the Children's Hope Scale is introduced and validated for use with children ages 8-16. Results suggest that the scale evidence internal consistency, and is relatively stable over retesting. Additionally, the scale exhibits convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity. Limitations and uses of the scale are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, individuals of all ages engaged in demonstrations condemning police brutality and supporting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Research that used parent reports and trends commented on in popular media suggested that adolescents under 18 had become increasingly involved in this movement. In the first large-scale quantitative survey of adolescents' exposure to BLM demonstrations, 4,970 youth (mean age = 12.88 y) across the United States highlighted that they were highly engaged, particularly with media, and experienced positive emotions when exposed to the BLM movement. In addition to reporting strong engagement and positive emotions related to BLM demonstrations, Black adolescents in particular reported higher negative emotions when engaging with different types of media and more exposure to violence during in-person BLM demonstrations. Appreciating youth civic engagement, while also providing support for processing complex experiences and feelings, is important for the health and welfare of young people and society., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest., (Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Several publications in the psychological literature support the theory that children are a major source of stress for their parents. Not surprisingly, parents of children with behavior problems--particularly children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)--experience highly elevated levels of daily child-rearing stresses. Children with ADHD disregard parental requests, commands, and rules; fight with siblings; disturb neighbors; and have frequent negative encounters with schoolteachers and principals. Although may investigations have dealt with parenting stress caused by disruptive children, only a handful of studies have addressed the question of how parents cope with this stress. Those findings are presented, including a series of studies assessing parental distress and alcohol consumption among parents of normal children and ADHD children after the parents interacted with either normal- or deviant-behaving children. Those studies strongly support the assumption that the deviant child behaviors that represent major chronic interpersonal stressors for parents of ADHD children are associated with increased parental alcohol consumption. Studies also have demonstrated that parenting hassles may result in increased alcohol consumption in parents of "normal" children. Given these findings, the stress associated with parenting and its influence on parental alcohol consumption should occupy a salient position among the variables that are examined in the study of stress and alcohol problems.

Poor readers (PRs) and controls (i.e., normal readers) from the second, fourth, and sixth grades were compared on four tasks chosen to measure the development of selective attention. The PRs performed more poorly than controls on the central but not on the incidental portion of an auditory memory task. The differences on the central task were interpreted as a function of group differences in mnemonic skills rather than selective attention. There were no group differences on either central or incidental portions of a visual memory task. In a speeded classification task, PRs exhibited a slower rate of information processing, measured in bits of information transmitted per second, than controls, but this difference in rate was not affected by distraction. On a dichotic listening task, PRs performed more poorly than controls under a variety of conditions in which the presence of distraction, the rate of information presentation, and attended ear were manipulated; the pattern of differences obtained, however, was not readily interpretable as a function of greater distractibility on the part of PRs than controls. As a whole, the results did not support the hypothesis that PRs show deficits in selective attention relative to age-matched normal readers. In addition, correlations computed among indices of selectivity (residualized gain scores) derived from the four tasks were uniformly low, suggesting that the four tasks did not measure the same cognitive construct. The implications for the study of reading disabilities and for the construct of selective attention in developmental studies are discussed.