Risk Factors for Internalizing and Externalizing Problems in the Preschool Years: Systematic Literature Review Based on the Child Behavior Checklist 1½–5

Early childhood is a common period for the onset of internalizing and externalizing problems. Many are the risk factors that contribute to the emergence of these types of problems. Literature enhances the importance of viewing the child as part of a system, in order to better understand the origin, the trajectory and the impact of risk factors in child mental health in preschool age. The current systematic literature review aims to examine empirical evidence based on the Child Behavior Checklist 1½–5 for risk factors related to the presence of internalizing and externalizing problems in children aged between 3 and 6 years old. The literature review includes articles published from January 2001 to December 2014. Twenty-eight articles that attend to pre-established inclusion and exclusion criteria were reported throughout the review. In general, results indicate that risk factors for internalizing and externalizing problems in preschool age can be organized into three main groups of risks: environment factors, parental/parenting factors, and child factors. It is clear that frequently more than one risk related to the emergence of internalizing and externalizing problems in preschool age children are reported. It is also possible to note that are few risks factors consistently studied in this age, highlighting the need for further investigation.     

Assessment of Basic Family Relationships: Portuguese Validation of the “Cuestionario de Evaluación de las Relaciones Familiares Básicas” (CERFB)

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Clinical intervention with families benefits from the accurate evaluation of family dynamics, requiring the development of assessment instruments that allow...     

Some thoughts on the creation of the child psychotherapist's role in a major teaching hospital

Twenty-three children, aged four to eight years, who had been exposed to violent attacks, were videotaped in individual 40-minute play sessions. These play narratives were recorded by a student researcher trained in narrative analysis and play therapy. She then sorted these play vignettes into three patterns of post-traumatic play, defined in the Children's Play Therapy Instrument/Adaptation for Trauma Research (CPTI/ATR). The three patterns were re-enactment with soothing; re-enactment without soothing; and overwhelming re-enactment. Each pattern was analysed further by the student researcher and the two authors of the scale to specify in detail the qualitative features of each pattern. Factors leading to resilience are identified and the contribution of play activity to repair is discussed.     

Visual influences on interactive speech alignment

Speech alignment describes the unconscious tendency to produce speech that shares characteristics with perceived speech (eg Goldinger, 1998 Psychological Review 105 251-279). In the present study we evaluated whether seeing a talker enhances alignment over just hearing a talker. Pairs of participants performed an interactive search task which required them to repeatedly utter a series of keywords. Half of the pairs performed the task while hearing each other, while the other half could see and hear each other. Alignment was assessed by naive judges rating the similarity of interlocutors' keywords recorded before, during, and after the interactive task. Results showed that interlocutors aligned more when able to see one another suggesting that visual information enhances speech alignment.     

Reasoning from unfamiliar premises: a study with unschooled adults

A long tradition of research initiated by Luria in the 1930s has established that unschooled adults perform poorly on reasoning tasks. Particularly when the premises are unfamiliar, they adopt an inappropriate empirical bias. However, recent findings show that young children with little or no schooling reason competently if prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet. We tested two groups of adults: illiterate, unschooled adults and adults with limited schooling. Both groups received problems that included either a premise with unknown content or a premise contradicting their everyday experience. When given a minimal prompt, both groups manifested the customary empirical bias. By contrast, when explicitly prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet, they reasoned accurately and appropriately justified their conclusions in terms of the supplied premises.     

Why do we share aggressive online content? Testing a short cycle model

The present study aimed to observe the impacts of aggressive online content exposure and personality on aggressive content sharing, considering the mediating role of positive and negative affects. A total of 302 Brazilians, equally divided into two groups, participated in a social network simulation, being exposed to aggressive (experimental group) or neutral (control group) posts and choosing what they would like to share on this site (among aggressive or nonaggressive material). A factorial MANOVA showed a significant difference for positive and negative affects and aggressive content sharing (Wilks' Λ = 0.936; F[3, 298] = 6.812; p = .001; η² = 0.064). Through structural equation modeling, an explanatory model was also tested, in which this behavior was directly predicted by aggressive online content exposure and suffered indirect effects from openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion, mediated by positive affects (goodness-of-fit index = 0.997, comparative fit-index = 0.998, Tucker-Lewis index = 0.996, SRMR = 0.028, root-mean-square error of approximation = 0.035, CI = 0.003−0.054). It is possible to conclude that the objectives are met, highlighting the contribution to understanding aggressive online behavior through the proximal processes described in the general aggression model.     

Interaction between consecutive learnings: inhibitory avoidance and habituation

Rats were submitted to step-down inhibitory avoidance training and to habituation of a rearing response to a tone with a 2-h interval between the two tasks, and were tested for retention of both tasks on the next day. When animals were trained first in inhibitory avoidance and then in habituation, retention of the avoidance behavior was impaired. When the animals were trained first in the habituation task and then in the avoidance task, retention of the two tasks was normal. The same results were obtained regardless of the order in which the two tasks were presented on the day of testing. This asymmetrical influence of habituation training on inhibitory avoidance retention could be due either to cognitive or, more likely, to task-specific neurochemical interactions.