Adoption studies were intended to separate genetic from environmental "causal" factors. In earlier adoption studies, psychiatric diagnostic labels for the adoptive parents were used as a proxy for the multiple dimensions of the family rearing environment. In the Finnish Adoption Study, research design provided the opportunity to study directly the adoptive family rearing environment. For this p...

AIM To assess the association between child growth and teacher-reported behavior and academic standing, and neuropsychological performance. METHOD The heights of 344 public-school children were measured using standard procedures. Teachers were requested to complete two behavioral and one academic performance rating scales. Neuropsychological assessment consisted of the Edinburgh Handedness In...

OBJECTIVE We compared associations of epilepsy remission status and severity as well as psychiatric and other comorbidities with child and parent-proxy reports of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in adolescents previously diagnosed with epilepsy. METHODS In a prospective, community-based study of newly diagnosed childhood epilepsy, HRQoL of 277 children was assessed 8 to 9 years after d...

Although major depressive disorder (MDD) has a variety of symptoms beyond the affective dimensions, the factor structure and contents of comprehensive psychiatric symptoms of this disorder have rarely been explored using the 18-item Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). We aimed to identify the factor structure of the 18-item BPRS in Korean MDD patients. A total of 258 MDD patients were recrui...

Psychiatric illnesses are often associated with multiple symptoms, whose severity must be graded for accurate diagnosis and treatment. This grading is usually done by trained clinicians based on human observations and judgments made within doctor-patient sessions. Current research provides sufficient reason to expect that the human voice may carry biomarkers or signatures of many, if not all, t...

English language practitioners have long relied on intuition-based scales for rating EFL/ESL writing. As these scales lack an empirical basis, the scores they generate tend to be unreliable, which results in invalid interpretations. Given the significance of the genre of description and the fact that the relevant literature does not introduce any data-based analytic scales for rating EFL descri...

BACKGROUND Catatonia was first described by Kahlbaum as a psychomotor disease with motor, behavioral, and affective symptoms. In keeping with this concept, we developed a rating scale for catatonia (Northoff Catatonia Scale [NCS]) with three different categories of symptoms (i.e., motor, behavioral, affective). Furthermore, the question of the relationship among catatonic symptoms, extrapyramid...

Anxiety syndromes are common in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with up to 30% suffering from panic disorder, and up to 11% from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Anxiety is associated with increased subjective motor symptoms, more severe gait problems, dyskinesias, freezing, and on/off fluctuations. Anxiety has a negative impact on health related quality of life and is strongly associ...