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11 - Social Cognitive Disorders, Executive Dysfunction and Karate
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c h a p i t r e 11 Social cognitive disorders, executive dysfunction and karate Mark T. Palermo The scope of this chapter is to give a brief overview of the neuropsychological background of the practice of karate as it pertains to social-emotional developmental disorders. It is the result of several years of work within the Italian Federation of Martial Arts (FIAM-Federazione Italiana Arti Marziali) on a project named «From the dojo to the Family to Society» (Palermo, 2006, p. 55). This karate program was developed by the Yoshokan school of karate, a dojo in existence for the past fifty years in Rome, on the grounds of our current knowledge of the social brain, in order to include in the ordinary dojo, children with disruptive behaviours and social cognitive disorders. Social cognitive disorders include a number of clinical conditions, mostly lifelong, which become apparent in early or middle childhood and are characterized primarily by objective and, in time, subjective difficulties pertaining to the interpersonal world of those affected. The disorders, as we shall see, range from the questionably epidemic ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) (Floet, Scheiner and Grossman, 2010, p. 56-69), to conditions falling under the rubric of Autism Spectrum Disorder (Frith and Happé, 2005, p. 86-90). Of note is that ADHD and ASD often share certain vulnerabilities (Brieber, Neufang, Bruning, Kamp-Becker, Remschmidt, Herpertz-Dahlmann, Fink and Konrad, 2007, p. 1251-1258) both clinically and scientifically. 262 Arts martiaux, sports de combat et interventions psychosociales Alongside with these two well described entities are a vast number of children who, while not meeting current criteria for either disorder, live peripherally because of extreme social clumsiness, often appearing odd, eccentric and different from their typically developing peers. Social cognition can be narrowly defined as the capacity to understand social situations and to act accordingly (Frith, 2008, p. 2033-2039). This capacity relies on a number of relatively well defined anatomical neural structures and on a series of skills that include executive functions, the capacity for both emotional expression and decoding across sensory modalities including facial, speech and gestural components, and the attentional skills to direct our sensory systems in the decoding of the communicative signals we receive from others. To a significant extent, social cognition involves also our own self perception, and an intact body awareness. One key element in social cognition and social development is joint attention. This can be defined as the capacity to consider the information gathered by one’s own directed visual attention while tuning it, so to say, with that of the visual attention of others we are interacting with. This involves both a response to others (RJA-Responding to Joint Attention) through following others’ gaze or gestures, for instance, as well as initiating joint attention (IJA) through one’s own gestural behaviours or by moving one’s own gaze back and forth between objects, to signify that we are both looking at the same thing, to signal a sharing process (Mundy, Sullivan and Mastergeorge, 2009, p. 2-21). The social brain (Frith, 2007, p. 671-678) includes structures that are key for both our understanding of the world and for modifying our behaviours in response to a variety of situations. Alongside with our social brain, is temperament, a probably innate set of qualities that have to do with our «being in the world», a characteristic that is present and measurable from a very early age. This temperamental set includes activity level, mood regulation, emotional intensity, adaptability, reactivity, attention, and persistence. All serve, in a way, as filters and modifiers of our experience. The social brain can be simplistically divided into an anterior and a posterior component, which may be viewed as executors and decoders, respectively, on the basis of the specific functions of the underlying brain. Likewise, a right versus left division of brain systems stands to signify the natural asymmetry that exists, not only insofar as the right hemisphere of brain controls and modulates the left part of the body and vice versa on a strictly sensory-motor level, but to an additional specialization of specific [44.204.94.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:57 GMT) Social cognitive disorders, executive dysfunction and karate 263 anatomical portions, where the right hemisphere may be viewed as responsible , among other things, for capacities such as body awareness, gestalt and visualization processes and the left is largely involved with language functions. Both systems, antero-posterior and left-right, include areas...