Examining Executive Functioning Using the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC)

As it was suggested by Strayhorn (1993) 2 decades ago, one of the most limiting constraints of our scientific progress in measuring human behavior has been our inability to produce valid and reliable instruments, despite our technological developments. These difficulties have been made readily apparent when trying to measure psychological constructs. In the philosophy of science, a construct has been defined as a product of the mind rather than independent of it. In other words, a construct is an “ideal object” of science as oppose to a “real” one. We have agreed in psychology that as constructs represent our ideas, they are not directly observable, and it is via our observations of their outcomes that we attempt to estimate and quantify them. The self-regulatory ability we call executive function in neuropsychology is one of the best examples of such elusive constructs (Jurado & Rosselli, 2007). Thus, an underlying assumption of this chapter is that executive functions emerge as outcomes of multiple interactions between cognitive and emotional control processes. These processes are mediated by basic connections within and between key neural nodes, involved in rule setting and organization of internal representations. The ultimate goal of these interactions is to produce volitional, purposeful, and efficient guided behavior (Garcia-Barrera, 2012).