Tisha J Ornstein

Toronto Metropolitan University · Department of Psychology

Purpose: Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders (HSD) are understudied conditions characterized by hallmark hypermobility and chronic pain. Disease manifestations lead to significant disability. Understanding predictors of disability, over and above the univariate construct of pain severity, is necessary to...

Background. Recovery following brain injury can be significantly impeded by the way in which an individual appraises pain, which in turn, can affect ability to cope with pain, and result in psychological distress. Pain catastrophizing, implicated in the appraisal of pain, can exacerbate the intensity of pain-related distress and impact psychologica...

Objectives: Guidelines on return-to-driving after traumatic brain injury (TBI) are scarce. Since driving requires the coordination of multiple cognitive, perceptual, and psychomotor functions, neuropsychological testing may offer an estimate of driving ability. To examine this, a meta-analysis of the relationship between neuropsychological testing...

Background The division of symptom themes into those related to incompleteness (INC) and those related to harm avoidance (HA) has been identified as an alternative to conventional subtyping. The aim of this study was to elucidate any potential differences between these two symptom themes based on neuropsychological task performance. Method: Partici...

Methods: The present study examined nursing care burden related to 55 institutionalized dementia patients using the Modified Nursing Care Assessment Scale (M-NCAS). Cognition was assessed with the Severe Impairment Battery (SIB), activities of daily living (ADLs) were measured with the Alzheimer's Disease Functional Assessment of Change Scale (ADF...

Repeatedly questioning others about perceived threats, or excessive reassurance seeking (ERS), occurs across various psychiatric disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; Parrish 2009). Three ERS domains have been consistently identified: ERS in response to general, decision-related, and social threats. We sought to examine whether (...

Objective: To examine the nature and frequency of cognitive fluctuations (CFs) among institutionalized persons with dementia. Method: A clinical interview and a medical chart review were conducted, and 55 patients were assigned a specific dementia diagnosis. The Severe Impairment Battery (SIB) was administered to assess cognitive function, and t...

Objective: Cognitive fluctuations (CFs) occur commonly in dementia of all types. While it is generally accepted that CFs can affect the clinical rating of dementia severity and neuropsychological performance, little is known about their impact on patients' activities of daily living (ADLs) and quality of life (QOL). Our study aims to explore the i...

OBJECTIVE Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is treated with either surgical clipping or endovascular coiling, though the latter is the preferred treatment method given its more favorable functional outcomes. However, neuropsychological functioning after treatment is rarely taken into account. In this meta-analysis, the authors synthesized relevant data...

It is well established that individuals with symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may experience compromised quality of life (QOL). For example, Jacoby et al. (2014) found that depression was the most significant predictor of QOL among treatment-seeking OCD patients, beyond OCD-related cognitions, symptoms, and anxiety. Despite previous...

Purpose: Despite a documented prevalence of accident phobia in almost 40% of motor vehicle accident (MVA) survivors, the onset of accident phobia after traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains poorly understood. There is currently a body of knowledge about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in patients with TBI, but less is known about accident phob...

The present study compared executive dysfunction among children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) after traumatic brain injury (TBI), also called secondary ADHD (S-ADHD), pre-injury ADHD and children with TBI only (i.e., no ADHD). Youth aged 6-16 years admitted for TBI to five trauma centers were enrolled (n=177) and evaluated wi...

The development of anxiety disorders following a traumatic brain injury is a strong predictor of social, personal, and work dysfunction; nevertheless, the emergence of anxiety has been largely unexplored and poorly understood in the context of TBI. This paper provides an overview of the limited published research to date on anxiety disorders that a...

The examination of test effort is an integral part of neuropsychological evaluation, as the validity of assessment findings is compromised if a patient fails to put forth an effortful performance. The Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM), a forced-choice technique for the detection of poor effort, is widely utilized and has been shown to be sensitive...

Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) show deficient response inhibition. ADHD itself is a common consequence of TBI, known as secondary ADHD (S-ADHD). Similarity in inhibitory control in children with TBI, S-ADHD, and ADHD would implicate impaired frontal-striatal systems; however, it is fir...

This study examines how emotion-focused orientation at retrieval affects memory for emotional versus neutral images in young and older adults. A total of 44 older adults (ages 61-84 years, M=70.00, SD=5.54) and 43 young adults (ages 17-33 years, M=20.58, SD=3.72) were tested on their free recall and forced-choice recognition of images. At retrieval...

Background: Neuropsychological deficits have often been found in studies of adults with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). However, few studies have examined such impairment in children with OCD and of those studies published, the results are mixed. Methods: In the present study, 14 OCD children were compared to 24 healthy developing children...

Executive control deficits are common sequelae of childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI). The goal of the current study was to assess a specific executive control function, performance monitoring, in children following TBI. Thirty-one children with mild-moderate TBI, 18 with severe TBI, and 37 control children without TBI, of comparable age and sex...

Although poor neuropsychological test performance is well documented in schizophrenia, how closely it resembles that seen in patients with brain damage in terms of cognitive failures in daily life and stability over time has been little studied. Thirty patients with chronic schizophrenia, 24 patients with frontal or temporal brain damage and 30 hea...

The goal of this study was to compare the predictive validity of the two main diagnostic schemata for childhood hyperactivity - attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- IV) and hyperkinetic disorder (HKD; International Classification of Diseases- 10th Edition). Diagnostic criteria for ADHD and HKD were used...

The authors sought to determine whether nonaffected siblings of ADHD probands have a motor response inhibition deficit and to assess concordance for this inhibition deficit in ADHD-concordant and ADHD-discordant sibling pairs. ADHD-concordant pairs (21 probands and their affected siblings), ADHD-discordant pairs (18 probands and their nonaffected s...

We studied error monitoring in ADHD and control children in a task requiring inhibition of a motor response. The extent of slowing following successful (stopped) and failed (nonstopped) inhibition was compared across groups. We also measured the time required to inhibit a response (stop signal reaction time, SSRT). Compared to controls, ADHD partic...

Groups of subjects whose primary drug of abuse was amphetamine or heroin were compared, together with age- and IQ-matched control subjects. The study consisted of a neuropsychological test battery which included both conventional tests and also computerised tests of recognition memory, spatial working memory, planning, sequence generation, visual d...