Influences of Parental and Best Friends' Smoking and Drinking on Adolescent Use: A Longitudinal Study1

Many studies have dealt with the relative impact of parents and peers on adolescent substance use. However, only a few studies have explored the role of adolescents themselves in social relationships. Homogeneity in behavioral patterns within friendships can also be generated by selective association. Acknowledgment of selection processes might shed new light on the debate on the influences of parents and friends. This paper examines the impact of parental and best friends' smoking and drinking on adolescents' use, using data (N= 1,063) from a 3-wave, 5-year longitudinal study. The results show that friends' smoking did not affect adolescent smoking over time. Only in early adolescence did friends' drinking exert an influence on subjects' alcohol use. On the other hand, parental use had a small but significant impact on their offspring. Furthermore, support was found for processes of selective association.     

Convergent behavioral and neuropsychological evidence for a distinction between identification and production forms of repetition priming

Four experiments examined a distinction between kinds of repetition priming which involve either the identification of the form or meaning of a stimulus or the production of a response on the basis of a cue. Patients with Alzheimer's disease had intact priming on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks and impaired priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks. Division of study-phase attention in healthy participants reduced priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks but not on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks. The parallel dissociations in normal and abnormal memory cannot be explained by implicit-explicit or perceptual-conceptual distinctions but are explained by an identification-production distinction. There may be separable cognitive and neural bases for implicit modulation of identification and production forms of knowledge.     

Engagement in Child and Adolescent Treatment: The Role of Parental Cognitions and Attributions

Parental engagement in the treatment process is influenced by parents' beliefs about the cause of their children's problems, perceptions about their ability to handle such problems, and expectations about the ability of therapy to help them. This paper examines the role of parental cognitions related to attributions and expectations in relation to engagement in child mental health treatment. Reviewed studies indicate that parental attributions and expectations influence three aspects of treatment: help seeking, engagement and retention, and outcome. This paper integrates findings from developmental and clinical research, highlights gaps in the literature, presents the beginnings of a model regarding the parental attributional process as it relates to engagement in treatment, recommends future research directions, and discusses clinical implications.     

Inflated perceptions of responsibility and obsessive-compulsive symptoms

In Salkovskis' [Salkovskis, P. (1985). Obsessional-compulsive problems: a cognitive-behavioural analysis. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28, 571-588; Salkovskis P. (1989) Cognitive-behavioural factors and the persistence of intrusive thoughts in obsessional problems. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 27, 677-682] cognitive model for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), inflated perception of responsibility is highlighted as the critical feature that maintains the disorder. In the current study, the relationship between responsibility and obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms was examined. Specifically, three measures of responsibility were evaluated for their psychometric properties. These measures were then used to test Salkovskis's model by examining the relationships among pervasive responsibility, automatic thoughts related to causing harm, and OC symptom severity. Findings provide partial support for the validity and reliability of the measures and for the model as a whole. Based on regression analyses, data support that pervasive responsibility significantly contributes to the prediction of OC symptoms. Furthermore, this relationship appears to be mediated by automatic thoughts related to causing harm in OCD contexts.     

Neuropsychological performance of emotionally disturbed students on the LNNB and LNNB-C

A number of researchers have reported an association between neuropsychological impairment and psychiatric disorders. However, there has been relatively little research on the neuropsychological functioning of emotionally disturbed students served in public schools. The purpose of this study was to determine the neuropsychological performance of 65 emotionally disturbed students 8–18 years old on the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery: Form I (LNNB) and the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery: Children's Revision (LNNB-C). The results indicated that approximately 42% of the younger group (99–154 months) and 38% of the older group (156– 226 months) demonstrated neuropsychological impairment as defined by criterion values for the various scales of the two batteries. On average, the emotionally disturbed students appeared to demonstrate more difficulty on more complex cognitive tasks, such as writing, arithmetic, and intellectual processes, than for less complex tasks, such as motor functions.