Neuropsychological impairment in soccer athletes.

Background: Soccer reportedly places participants at risk for neuropsychological impairment, although it is unknown if the risk is associated primarily with concussion, subconcussive blows from heading the ball, or some combination thereof. Moreover, the extent to which younger versus older athletes are at risk for soccer-related cognitive impairment is unclear. We hypothesized that soccer athletes, especially older ones, would show poorer neuropsychological test performance than comparable swimmers.

Interactive effects of characteristics of defendant and mock juror on U.S. participants' judgment and sentencing recommendations.

The authors examined the effects of interactions (a) between defendant attractiveness and juror gender and (b) between defendant race and juror race on judgment and sentencing among 207 Black, Hispanic, and White participants in the United States. After reading a vehicular-homicide vignette in which the defendant's attractiveness and race varied, the participants rated guilt and recommended sentences. The women treated the unattractive female defendant more harshly than they treated the attractive female defendant; the men showed an opposite tendency.

Qualitative analysis of verbal fluency output: review and comparison of several scoring methods.

We compared three approaches to scoring qualitative aspects of verbal fluency performance in 88 healthy young adults. Phonemic and semantic fluency output was scored for word clustering and switching between clusters. Convergent validity analyses using other tests presumed to tap into strategy use (California Verbal Learning Test, Ruff Figural Fluency Test) support scoring of phonemic and semantic clusters on both fluency tasks.

Features resembling Tourette's syndrome in developmental stutterers.

Developmental stuttering (DS) may be related to the extrapyramidal motor system and shares many clinical similarities with Tourette's syndrome (TS), which is widely believed to be associated with extrapyramidal dysfunction. Twenty-two stutterers were examined for neuropsychiatric features commonly seen in TS, including tics, obsessive-compulsive behaviors (OCB), and attention deficit disorders. Eleven stutterers displayed motor tics, and symptoms of OCB were observed at rates similar to those seen in persons with TS.

School problems in Tourette's syndrome.

Background: A retrospective study of 138 children with Tourette's syndrome for associated school problems revealed that at the time of initial evaluation, 64 subjects (46%) experienced a school-related problem.

Objective: To survey a childhood population with Tourette's syndrome to explore the contributions of neurobehavioral concomitants to academic difficulties.

Results: A diagnosis of a specific learning disorder had previously been made in 30 (22%) of 138 children.