The association between axis I and II psychiatric symptoms and high-risk sexual behavior during adolescence

This study was conducted to investigate the association between psychiatric disorders and high-risk sexual behavior among adolescent primary care patients. Interviews assessing anxiety, conduct, depressive, eating, substance use, and personality disorders (PDs), as well as histories of sexual behavior were administered to 119 male and 284 female adolescent primary care patients. Results indicated that, after co-occurring psychiatric disorders were controlled statistically, adolescents with elevated PD symptom levels were more likely than adolescents without elevated PD symptom levels to report a high number of sexual partners during the past year and during their lifetime. Adolescents with a history of conduct disorder were more likely than adolescents without such a history to report a high number of lifetime unsafe sexual partners. Elevated antisocial, dependent, and paranoid PD symptom levels were associated with high-risk sexual behavior after co-occurring psychiatric disorders were controlled. Further, certain specific antisocial, borderline, dependent, histrionic, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, and schizotypal PD symptoms were independently associated with high-risk sexual behavior after co-occurring psychiatric disorders and overall PD symptom levels were controlled. The association between overall PD symptom levels and the number of sexual partners was significantly stronger among the females than among the males in the sample. Increased recognition and treatment of PDs, coupled with increased recognition of high-risk sexual behavior may facilitate the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy among adolescents.     

Approval of violence by males in western Canada

Violent and defensive attitudes were surveyed in a sample of 1,010 males in western Canada.     

Teaching teenagers with autism to seek assistance when lost

Three teenagers with autism were taught to respond to a vibrating pager to seek assistance in community settings when physically separated from their parents or teachers. A multiple baseline probe design across participants demonstrated that, upon being paged, participants successfully handed a communication card to a community member indicating that they were lost. Generalization was assessed in nontraining community sites and on outings with the participants' parents.     

Separating From the Mothership: A Coordinated Individual and Parent-Based Approach to Severe Agoraphobia in a Young Adult

Families are invested in an older adolescent gradually separating from the family to live independently as an adult, but for many families, adolescent psychopathology makes this transition difficult. Addressing such psychopathology is critical in preventing “failure to launch,” a breakdown in gaining age-appropriate independence from parents. This case study illustrates a promising approach directed at helping an 18-year-old female with agoraphobia and panic disorder who, upon intake, was at risk for long-lasting, prohibitive dependence on her parents. The clinical approach entails the convergence of two psychological treatments conducted in the same treatment center. One provider, working directly with the patient, delivered traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxiety. A second provider, working with the parents, delivered Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) a parent-based treatment focused on reducing family accommodation of the patient’s anxiety. Behavioral indices and self-report scores indicated clinically significant improvement following the combined intervention. Attention is drawn to the convergence of those treatments and the utility and special considerations in taking this kind of approach. Overall, the combined treatment may have been more successful than the sum of its parts at preventing failure to launch. This case study, the first to describe the integration of CBT and SPACE, can provide useful guidance for clinicians helping families of adult children to transition to independence.     

Life Interrupted: Family Routines Buffer Stress during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Adoption of certain behavioral and social routines that organize and structure the home environment may help families navigate the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The current cross-sectional study aimed to assess family routines prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic and examine associations with individual and family well-being. Using a national sample, 300 caregivers of children ages 6-18 were surveyed using Amazon Mechanical Turk platform during the first three months of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Caregivers reported on family demographics, COVID-19-related stress, engagement in family routines (prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic), stress mindset, self-efficacy, and family resiliency. Overall, families reported engaging in fewer routines during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic. COVID-19-related stress was highest in low-income families, families of healthcare workers, and among caregivers who had experienced the COVID-19 virus. Moreover, COVID-19-related stress was negatively related to self-efficacy, positively related to an enhancing stress mindset, and negatively related to family resilience. Engagement in family routines buffered relations between COVID-19-related stress and family resilience, such that COVID-19-related stress was not associated with lower family resilience among families that engaged in high levels of family routines. Results suggest that family routines were challenging to maintain in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but were associated with better individual and family well-being during this period of acute health, economic, and social stress.

     

Optimising Exposure for Children and Adolescents with Anxiety,OCD and PTSD: A Systematic Review

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - Cognitive behavioural therapy is an effective treatment for anxiety disorders in children and young people; however, many do not benefit. Behavioural...     

Testing the GRIP: An Empirical Examination of the Gender Roles Inhibiting Prosociality Model

Although men and women help others, there are systematic gender differences in the type of helping they perform. Consistent with traditional gender roles and stereotypes, men typically help in agentic ways, and women typically help in communal ways. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the Gender Roles Inhibiting Prosociality model predicts that gender stereotypes about gender-inconsistent helping create negative attitudes, restrictive subjective norms, and low self-efficacy that undermine helping intentions, which, in turn, reduce engagement in gender-inconsistent helping contexts. Across three studies (N?=?1,355), we find empirical support for the hypothesized model: When asked to imagine engaging in a gender-inconsistent (vs. gender-consistent) helping scenario, participants anticipated feeling worse, expected others to judge them more negatively, and reported decreased self-efficacy beliefs, and these factors predicted lower intentions to engage in gender-inconsistent helping. Critically, behavioral intentions explained some of the variance in gender-inconsistent helping during the following month. Internal meta-analyses of the differences between gender-consistent and -inconsistent helping on attitudes, subjective norms, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions across studies revealed small-to-medium average effect sizes (ds?=?0.16—0.47). These results have the potential to inform interventions aimed at increasing helping in all its forms.

     

Therapist Behavior During Exposure Tasks Predicts Habituation and Clinical Outcome in Three Randomized Controlled Trials for Pediatric OCD

This study measured therapist behaviors in relation to subsequent habituation within exposure tasks, and also tested their direct and indirect relationships (via habituation) with clinical outcomes of exposure therapy. We observed 459 videotaped exposure tasks with 111 participants in three clinical trials for pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (POTS trials). Within exposure tasks, therapist behaviors and patient fear were coded continuously. Outcomes were habituation and posttreatment change in symptom severity, global improvement, and treatment response. More therapist behaviors that encourage approach—and less use of accommodation, unrelated talk, and externalizing language—predicted greater subsequent habituation during individual exposure tasks (exposure-level), and also predicted improved patient clinical outcomes via higher “total dose” of habituation across treatment (patient-level indirect effect). For six of seven therapist behaviors analyzed, the relationship with subsequent habituation within exposure differed by patient fear (low, moderate, or high) at the time the behavior was used. Two therapist behaviors had direct effects in the opposite direction expected; more unrelated talk and less intensifying were associated with greater patient symptom reduction. Results shed light on the “black box” of in-session exposure activities and point to specific therapist behaviors that may be important for clinical outcomes. These behaviors might be best understood in the context of changing patient fear during exposure tasks. Future studies should test whether therapist behaviors can be experimentally manipulated to produce improvement in clinical outcomes.     

Temporal ambiguity of onsets in a cueing task prevents facilitation but not inhibition of return

Cueing effects, i.e., early facilitation of reaction time and inhibition of return (IOR), are well-established and robust phenomena characterizing exogenous orienting and are widely observed in experiments with a traditional Posner cueing paradigm. Krüger, MacInnes, and Hunt (2014) proposed that facilitatory effects of peripheral cues are the result of a cue-target perceptual merging due to re-entrant visual processing. To test the role and timing of these feedback mechanisms in peripheral cueing effects, we modified the traditional cueing task in Experiments 1-3 by interleaving pre- and post-cue trials at the valid and invalid location and random cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA) ranging from ?300 to +1,000 ms. Analysis of the manual reaction time distribution over CTOA showed well-pronounced IOR in the valid pre-cue condition and a small cost of perceptual merging in the post-cue condition, but no early facilitation of reaction time was observed in the pre-cue condition. In Experiment 4, we tested directly whether temporal ambiguity eliminated facilitation by restricting CTOAs to only the pre-cue time range and including a between-subject manipulation of a) random, b) mixed discrete, and c) blocked discrete CTOAs. Results obtained in the continuous and binned conditions showed no facilitation but robust IOR. We found both early facilitation and IOR in the blocked condition. Overall, the present findings show a small perceptual merging result without accompanying facilitation, suggesting different underlying mechanisms. Second, they demonstrate that early facilitation is likely to be affected by the presence or absence of temporal expectations and that the early onset of IOR might be masked by stronger facilitation in traditional cueing experiments.     

Is the devil in the detail? Evidence for S-S learning after unconditional stimulus revaluation in human evaluative conditioning under a broader set of experimental conditions

Whether valence change during evaluative conditioning is mediated by a link between the conditional stimulus (CS) and the unconditional stimulus (US; S-S learning) or between the CS and the unconditional response (S-R learning) is a matter of continued debate. Changing the valence of the US after conditioning, known as US revaluation, can be used to dissociate these accounts. Changes in CS valence after US revaluation provide evidence for S-S learning but if CS valence does not change, evidence for S-R learning is found. Support for S-S learning has been provided by most past revaluation studies, but typically the CS and US have been from the same stimulus category, the task instructions have suggested that judgements of the CS should be based on the US, and USs have been mildly valenced stimuli. These factors may bias the results in favour of S-S learning. We examined whether S-R learning would be evident when CSs and USs were taken from different categories, the task instructions were removed, and more salient USs were used. US revaluation was found to influence explicit US evaluations and explicit and implicit CS evaluations, supporting an S-S learning account and suggesting that past results are stable across procedural changes.