Chapter 5

Many of the behaviors of daily life reflect executive functions. How well one pays attention, focuses, listens, and follows through on instructions are basic skills of life, and carry broad implications for functioning at school, at work, at home, in relationships, and in other settings.

Making careless errors, failing to keep track of things, forgetting things, and leading a sloppy, disorganized life are common indicators of suboptimal executive functioning

Executive functions is an umbrella term that is meant to characterize the interrelated cluster of higher order cognitive functions that help an individual modulate their emotional and behavioral responses to the environment through problem solving, planning, attention, verbal reasoning, and related tasks.

Neurologically, executive functioning occurs in the prefrontal cortex, sometimes referred to as the cortical section of the brain.

Skills related to planning, monitoring, and regulating behavior

Multiple processes that include planning, decision making, judgment, and self-perception

Executive function resembles metacognition, which includes monitoring, planning, organization, coordinating knowledge and resources, and self-regulation

Skills that are required for goal-directed and purposeful activity, volition, planning, purposeful action, and effective performance

A set of general-purpose control processes that regulate one’s thoughts and behaviors

Social work professionals and forensic social workers often have extensive contact with individuals with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

What is today known as ADHD was once referred to as “defect of moral conduct,” “defect of moral control,” “post-encephalitic behavior disorder,” “hyperkinetic disease of infancy,” “minimal brain damage,” “minimal brain dysfunction,” and others.

There are three types of ADHD: one that relates predominantly to impulsivity, one that relates predominantly to hyperactivity-impulsivity, and a combined type that includes both.

The criteria for ADHD read like a list of executive dysfunctions.

One of the best ways that social work professionals can help children and adolescents with ADHD and their families is to help parents to get involved in their child’s treatment.

The executive function deficits that children with ADHD have contribute to a range of issues that can impair the entire family, including overall family functioning.

Meta-analytic research found that parents who get involved in their child’s treatment are likely to positively impact child internalizing symptoms and academic problems.

These improvements contribute to greater family functioning and better relations between parents, children, and siblings. Moreover, these interventions are grounds for optimism at treating children with ADHD and improving their social functioning.

Etiological Factors for Executive Functions•Genetic Factors•Prenatal Exposure to Toxins•Parental Involvement, Engagement, and Interaction

•Socioeconomic Status•Nutrition

Develop alertness by focusing on caregiver faces

Engage in eye contact Develop emotional responses to the

sight of a caregiver’s face Distract themselves by orienting to a

new stimulus Discriminate between objects and

subjects in their environment Attend to novel stimuli

Remember goal-based stimuli Coordinate visual attention with fine-

motor skills Look to sounds Engage in joint attention Begin to gesture to caregivers Point Imitate environmental stimuli

Children with the greatest executive function deficits show the greatest gains from education programs. In this way, executive function training goes a long way to reduce the cognitive and behavioral gaps that exist between controls and children with executive dysfunction, such as those with ADHD.

The greatest improvements in child executive functioning are seen from intensive, demanding programs.

Executive function training can be cost-effectively accomplished in regular classrooms, and its use in public school curricula provides the greatest promise for large-scale improvements. Programs that combine executive function training with exercise (e.g., martial arts) tend to show better effects among older children.

Effective programs reduce classroom stress, improve child self-confidence and self-efficacy, and increase bonding with prosocial peers. These factors are in turn associated with improved executive functioning and academic achievement.

The well-known increase in antisocial behavior during adolescence reflects the difficulty of frontal areas of the brain to modulate reward and emotional impulses from subcortical areas.

When executive functions are unable to modulate emotion and reward-based motivations, the result is behavioral disinhibition• This is a general behavioral tendency characterized

by failure to inhibit antisocial behaviors because of susceptibility to emotional impulses and rewards, such as substance use.

Meta-analysis of 126 studies that involved 14,784 participants reported a medium grand mean effect size, indicating that antisocial individuals have greater neuropsychological deficits than their conventional peers.

Additionally, largest effects were found when comparing criminality and externalizing behavior disorders.

In criminology, these deficits in executive functioning are often called neuropsychological deficits. These are brain-based deficits in social cognitive processes that are risk factors for conduct problems and related maladaptive behaviors, such as school problems, relationship problems, work problems, and unhealthy habits.

Executive functions are a set of cognitive functions that broadly involve emotional and behavioral regulation, planning, decision making, and related tasks.

The evolution of executive functioning enabled human development and broadened the intellectual capacity of humans.

Barkley’s model suggests that executive functions reflect the internalization of speech, emotion, and conduct and a future orientation, compared to external constraints that caused behavior.

Cold executive functions involve cognitive processes and distinct neural circuits, whereas hot executive functions involve affective/emotional processes and other neural circuits.

A host of disorders, especially ADHD and autism, involve impairments in executive functioning.

Social work practice often involves cognitive restructuring, emotional training, and decision-making tasks that broadly serve to improve executive performance.

Neuropsychological deficits are a strong correlate of antisocial behavior in large part because they reflect impairments in cortical control of emotional impulses and rewards.

ADHD is among the most common neurobehavioral disorders and reflects deficits in attention, impulsivity, and activity.

Although executive functions are largely genetic in origin, a range of treatment modalities and interventions have shown success in improving these functions among children, adolescents, and adults.