Rejection, intelligence and ADD
and ADHD people.
Lawrence Weathers, Ph.D.Psychologist
emailled the following and the accompanying article:
In my work with ADHD/ADD
I have long been struck by how depressed these children’s intellectual
functioning is before treatment
and the dramatic improvements that happen immediately after CAER
treatment. Often, difficult
reading or math assignments become easy for them. This article explains
one reason why this occurs.
ADHD children often feel
rejected by adults and peers. Consistently one of the things that they
want to work on for themselves is the rejection they feel from adults and
peers.
This rejection lowers their
self-esteem, and as noted in this study, this precipitates more aggressive
behavior. This in turn causes
more rejection, and so on. As this cycle iterates, their feelings of rejection
increase. As this article also notes, feeling rejected causes a large drop
in IQ. This is seen in their poor academic performance. A vicious circle
develops that creates increasingly severe behavioral and academic problems.
This is very serious because IQ is a major predictor of a child’s future
success.
When these feelings of rejection
extinguished with CAER treatment, follow-up reports from parents
indicate academic performance
rebounds and that they often become well liked by teachers and peers.
E. 6921 Jamieson Rd.
Spokane WA 99223-1845
509-448-6462, weathers@caer.com
www.caer.com, www.adhdhelp.org
Baumeister
presented these results at the annual conference of the British Psychological
Society in Blackpool, Lancashire, UK.
Rejection
can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically,
while increasing their aggression, according to new research.
"It's
been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and
aggressive," says Roy Baumeister of the CaseWestern ReserveUniversity in
Ohio, who led the work. "But we've found that randomly assigning students
to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive."
Baumeister's
team used two separate procedures to investigate the effects of rejection.
In the first, a group of strangers met, got to know each other, and then
separated. Each individual was asked to list which two other people they
would like to work with on a task. They were then told they had been chosen
by none or all of the others.
In
the second, people taking a personality test were given false feedback,
telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and
family.
Aggression
scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately
dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped
by 30 per cent.
"These
are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says
Baumeister. "This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem
designed to get along with others, and when you're excluded, this has significant
effects."
Baumeister
thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control. "To live in society,
people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour.
Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and
self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in
an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively."
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