ADHD

1. ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
2. Some of the common symptoms include impulsiveness, hyperactivity, and short attentions spans. These kids can't sit still, they have to do something all the time. But even if they find something fun to do, they will probably not do it for a very long time. They are very good at starting things but not as good at taking the time to finish it. 
3. The cause of ADHD is not completely known but most of the time it seems to be caused by genetics. One-third of all parents with ADHD get children who has it too. Studies shows the neurotransmitters and nerve pathways regulating behaviors, functions abnormally in people with ADHD. Also parts of their brains can be smaller or less active. 
4. There is no simple way to diagnose ADHD. What psychologists do is that they gather evaluations of the child from parents, teachers, and sometimes from friends and relatives as well. To be diagnosed with ADHD the child has to show that their behavior is consistent in all environments. 
5. The worldwide prevalence of ADHD is 5.29%. 
6. There is no real cure for this conditions but there is medication that will reduce the symptoms. Ritalin is a stimulant that normally speeds up your system, but for people with ADHD it is very calming and it makes their brains work like the brains of people without ADHD.   
7. The prognosis for someone with ADHD is that about 50% of the children with ADHD will continue to have symptoms as adults while the rest seem to outgrow it. The positive news is that the adult can easier control and hide there problems. Most children with ADHD have great difficulties in school and with social interaction and that can cause low self-esteem. Some of these children also develop other problems like conduct disorder. And 25% of these adults develop antisocial behaviors and they have a higher risk or committing crimes and abuse drugs and substances. The rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts are also much higher for people exposed to comorbidity. 

Stress and cortisol

Cortisol is produced in the adrenal cortex and then it gets released into the blood where it gets transported to all parts of the body. Almost every cell in the body contains receptors for cortisol. Cortisol can have many different effects on the body depending on the type of cell that receives it. It helps control blood sugar levels, regulates metabolism, acts as anti-inflammatory, controls salt and water balances, and it influences our blood pressure. When a woman is pregnant and ready for childbirth, cortisol can also help to trigger the process.
The release of cortisol is liked to your daily activity patterns, and the cortisol levels are highest when you are most active and working. The main thing that causes additional releases of cortisol is stress. Stress can be anything from worrying about a test that you have the following day, to having to run for your life. In our ancestors this was mainly to help them survive life threatening situations but nowadays we do not have a lot of those situations. We are however exposed to stress more frequently. Our daily life is filled with all kinds of stress. First we go to school or to work, and then as soon as we get home we have a million things to fix. There are very few days when we aren't exposed to stress.
Cortisol helps the body to deal with stress but to much of it can be harmful. Too much cortisol over a long period of time can lead to a condition called Cushing's syndrome. The symptoms are rapid weight gain mainly in the face making it flushed and round, high blood pressure, muscle weakness, increased thirst an frequency of urination, and also big mood swings. Women can have some further symptoms like a lack of sex drive and irregular periods.

Charles Whitman

It is no surprise that abuse has a strong influence on children but what we did not know earlier was how much abuse damaged the brain physically. Since the greatest impact on the brain comes from the experiences from the childhood, child abuse will have a big effect on how a child will turn out as an adult. Studies have shown that abused children have a smaller corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is in the center of the brain and it connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This means that if it's smaller it might effect how well the brain communicates between the two halves. But it is not only physical abuse that will affect our children. Sexual and verbal abuse can have just as big of an impact. A study showed that these patients had a smaller amygdala and hippocampus. This means that kids that have been abused or sexually harassed often have behavior problems and they have a harder time controlling their emotions and they can't handle them properly which can lead to them being more aggressive. Because of their behavior problems abused children are more likely to commit crimes and abuse drugs, get depressions and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other health problems. Scientists have done experiments with brain activity and patients with history of abuse are twice as likely to show abnormal electrical activity and they also think about suicide 4-5 times more frequently than people with normal brain activity.
Charles Whitman was born in 1941 in Florida. His father would regularly abuse both his wife and his children and he also taught his sons how to shoot and take care of weapons. Charles often went on hunting trips with his dad when he was young and he was also a very smart and talented kid who did great in school. His parents encouraged his academic accomplishments but whenever he failed he immediately got punished physically by his father. He was described as a well-mannered and polite kid but the way people though of him quickly changed in 1966. On July 31, 1966 Whitman drove to his mothers house and stabled her to death. He covered her in sheets and left a handwritten note that said "I have just taken my mothers life. I am very upset over having done it. However, I feel that if there is a heaven she is definitely there now... I am truly sorry...Let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart". Later when he came home to his own house he stabbed his wife to death, and as with his mother he covered her in sheets and left a note saying that he loved her dearly. In this note he also said something very interesting. "I do not understand myself these days" and he also clearly stated that he knew that something was wrong with him and that he was different. Therefore he wanted to donate his brain to a mental health foundation with the hope that "Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type". The next day, on August 1, he went to the University of Texas at Austin and went up the big tower in the middle of the campus. On the way up he shot 3 people and when he got the the top of the tower he brought up his guns and started shooting people on the ground. He shot 11 more people and injured 32. Whitman was killed by a police officer and as he has asked his body was examined after his death. They found a tumor in the brain that was pushing on the part controlling impulses but they could not prove that it was the cause for his actions.

Genie the feral child

In 1970 the police found a thirteen year old girl locked in a dark and almost empty room in a house where she lived with her parent and an older brother. The room consisted of one crib where she slept and a potty chair which she was tied to most of the time. The girl is recognized by the name Genie to the public to keep her identity more private. Both parents were accused for child abuse but her dad committed suicide the day before going to court. Even though Genie was thirteen, she was the size of a six year old kid when she was found. She was malnourished and since she had not been able to move around her body was extremely weak and she could not walk properly. Also her father would beat her if she tried to speak or made any noise so she had learned to stay quiet. This meant that Genie was unable to speak and communicate. She was one of the mot extreme cases of child abuse which made her very interesting to psychologist and linguists. Researchers thought this was such a great opportunity that they set up a team of psychologists, linguistics, and teachers that would partially study Genie and partially help her recover. There had been a theory that children are only able to learn language during a specific period of time and when that time has passed it is too late. Genie would have passed this phase already so depending on if she could learn language or not she would either support the idea or maybe even prove it wrong. At the beginning Genie made great progress and she started to learn words and expand her vocabulary. It looked very promising and everybody thought that the theory would get proven wrong when Genie started to use words to describe emotions and events from the past. But then the progress stopped and she didn't move forwards anymore. She knew lots of words but she was unable to make any sentences and she could not understand grammar. There was a similar case in France during the 1800's when a twelve year old boy just came out of the forest one day. He was very hairy, ate things humans would not normally eat, he moved more like an animal than like a human and he had scars all over his body. All of this showed that he had been living in the woods for most of his life. His teacher failed in civilizing the boy, who they called Victor, and he was not able to learn language either. He only learned a bunch of words, just like Genie. Both these cases supports the theory that there is a deadline for learning language, even though you can learn how to produce words later. Another big question that the scientists had was that they wanted to know if Genie was retarded from birth or if the only cause for her slowed brain development was the extreme abuse and mistreatment. They did sleep studies (eeg) on her and the results were abnormal but they couldn't draw any conclusions from it.
 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is an anxiety disorder thought to be caused by exposure to a traumatic event. People with PTSD can be victims from sexual or physical abuse, people that experienced a car accident, or soldiers coming back from the military. What happens with these people is that they relive a terrifying moment over and over again. The strong memory can be brought back by small things like seeing something that reminds them of the event and all of a suddenly they feel all the emotions they felt at the occasion of the actual event. Symptoms of PTSD often includes thing like flashbacks, hyper-arousal, nightmares and isolation. Victims of abuse might choose to be more is isolation because they are scared of the outside world and they think that what happened to them once will happen again, and that it is unenviable. These people as well as veterans have another strong reason for not wanting to interact with people; they feel like nobody can relate to what they've been through. They feel like people sometimes make fun of them for being so "dramatic" and that it can feel pointless to be around people who do not understand what it feels like have seen death. Some also have trouble getting close to people again because they are scared that they are going to lose them and they want to avoid that kind of pain again. Many of the soldiers coming back form war also have survivors guilt. They start questioning why they survived and not their friends and they often don't feel like they deserve to live. It is not considered manly to ask for help so to deal with all their problems when they come back many of the soldiers turn to alcohol and drugs, and many of them want to go back to the military where they feel like they fit in and everybody knows what they are going through but this only makes the problems bigger. Prolonged exposure therapy is when you make the patient remember what happened and describe it detail. This is done repeatedly so that the person won't associate the memory with as strong feelings as time passes. Another method for recovery is cognitive processing therapy. This is when the patient is taught to separate the event that happened to them from normal life and realize that what they've been through isn't normal.
   

Alzheimer's and brain-imaging

Alzheimer's was first described by a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist named Alois Alzheimer in 1906. The disease is the most common form of dementia and it is 100% fatal meaning that nobody survives it. In 2006 there were about 26.6 million people worldwide with Alzheimer's and in 2050, 1 in 85 will be expected to have it which would mean that about 100 million people would have it.  Alzheimer's slowly kills the brain and the first and most affected area is the hippocampus. The first sign of the disease is memory loss but since Alzheimer's is a disease that comes with age, people think that the forgetfulness is because of the aging so they feel no reason to be worried. It's not until the person starts forgetting major things that the family or friends are alarmed and feel that something is wrong. Another early sign of Alzheimer's is that the person starts repeating questions or telling the same stories over and over again, even during the same day. If the disease is discovered early enough the patient can be given medicines. These medicines do not cure the person but they can slow down the process of the killing of brain cells. During the middle stage the memory loss keeps getting worse and the patient start forgetting personal history and they also forget who their family and friends are. This can be very hard for the loved ones to witness since they can no longer have the same relationship as they once had with the person. They also easily forget what they were doing or where they were going and they can easily get lost in familiar settings. The patients sometimes get lost in their own yard or they go out to get the mail, but forget what they were doing and don't remember how to get back inside. At this stage personalities might change as well and the sweetest person might become aggressive and grumpy. At the third stage of Alzheimer's the patients can rarely speak and they can no longer take care of themselves. Basic functions shut down one by one and they start loosing abilities like swallowing for example. These patients need around the clock supervision but they will all eventually die, it is just a matter of time. Since Alzheimer's is such a big health issue there are many people studying how Alzheimer's effects the brain with the hopes of getting a better understanding of what happens and most importantly, finding a cure for the disease or find a way to stop it from happening. So far they have not succeeded with either of the two last ones but they did make some helpful findings. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, (MRI) is one of the most common ways to study the brain. MRI's can be used to scan your whole body and by using an MRI you can get very clear images of what the structure of the brain looks like. This means that you can identify if anything seems abnormal in the structure or if the brain is shrinking for example. They also show how the blood flows and can therefore be used to detect any problems with circulation and they are completely safe to use. But there are some weaknesses with MRI's. To start with are they very expansive which means that not everybody can afford it. Another thing is that you have to lie completely still while the machine is scanning your brain, and a scan can take anything from 10 min up to 2 hours. Also a weakness is that they can't say anything about the cause or effects of anything they find so you can't draw any real conclusion, only assumptions. Another method used when studying the brain is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). MRI's and fMRI's work in very similar ways but the main difference is that an fMRI's show brain activity in all parts of the brain and not just images. But you can't establish cause and effect relationships here either. Another limitation for both MRI's and fMRI's is that it can not be performed in a natural environment. The machines used are huge and they can't be moved. What this means that all the testing is done in labs and never in real life situations.

Violence described by evolution

Even though violence is seen as a terrible thing it must have had some kind of benefit to our ancestors. Seen from the evolutionary point of view this would be the only explanation for why we have it today. Survival of the fittest means that only the best adapted species will survive. If your kind is not properly adapted to the environment you have a very little chance of making it to adulthood and if you don't grow old enough to reproduce, you wont pass on your genes and the population of the species will decline and maybe even completely disappear. The same theory goes for individuals. Even in a single species every individual is unique and slightly different. These differences can be either harmful or beneficial. If it's harmful the individual will probably die at an early ages and its genes wont get passed on to the next generation. But if the mutation is beneficial the genes will get passed on to the next generation, and it will keep getting passed on as long as it doesn't hurt the species. This also means that more and more individuals in this species will have this mutation and after a while it wont be seen as a mutation anymore.
 Being aggressive was probably a very important factor for early humans for a couple of reasons. The men had to go out and collect food for their families while the women were taking care of the children. When the men were out hunting it was important to be strong and aggressive when encountering a big animal so that they could defend themselves and also to be able to actually kill animals for food. The men also had to defend their territory from other humans and animals and it was the men's job to protect their families form all kinds of danger. A lot of violence is based on staying alive and protecting you family. Beating someone unconscious and then stealing their wallet can be connected with getting money for food, cloths, and housing. A gang shooting another gang can be related to defending their territory. And a guy shooting another guy who is hitting on his girlfriend can be explained by him feeling challenged by this new potential mate for his girl. For men a lot of violence is connected to jealousy. In evolution everything is about finding a mate and passing on your genes. So when a male sees someone flirting with his mate he immediately sees the new guy as a treat that he has to get rid of to ensure that is it his genes that get passed on. Jealousy is also the number one cause for spouse abuse, and males are more likely to injure or kill stepchildren which would be evolutionary explained by the male not wanting to take the risk of not having his own genes passed on.
                                                                            

Question responses

What is the theory of evolution?

Evolution is the theory that everything evolves and changes with time because of natural selection. Natural selection is based on survival of the fittest. That means that the animals and plants that are adapted the best to their environment will survive long enough to be able to reproduce and pass on their genes. While the ones that aren't that well adapted will die at a younger age and fewer will grow old enough to pass on their genes. As a result of this, a species is able to slowly evolve if needed. This theory also suggests that all animals and plans have the same ancestor and that's why we can see similarities in structure and function between different animals. Some animals are more closely related witch means that they have more things in common and have a more recently shared ancestor, like humans and monkeys. 

Who is Charles Darwin?

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and in 1831 he went on a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, 500 miles west of South America. This is where he noticed that each of the islands had their own version of a kind of finch. They were all very similar but they all had some special feature that was a benefit to the specific island where they lived. This is when he thought that maybe they had all evolved from the same finch but adapted differently to the different environments. Darwin worked his theory of natural selection for 20 years and when he found out the Alfred Russel Wallace had similar ideas they came together and announced their ideas in 1858. 

What is evolutionary psychology? 

Evolutionary psychology is the theory that the functions of our brain and our behaviors is the result of evolution. As our ancestors leaned how to deal with problems and how to make things as easy as possible and taught these things to their children they evolved a new behavior and now we do it without thinking about it. An example of evolutionary psychology is language. Humans started using language to make communication easier and it made them able to express more complex thoughts and now all humans use it for everyday life.