Preventative Behavioral Parent Training: A Preliminary Investigation of Strategies for Preventing At-Risk Children From Developing Later Conduct Problems

Children exhibiting conduct problems comprise the largest source of referrals to children's mental health services. The treatment for conduct problems that possesses the greatest amount of empirical support is behavioral parent training. Unfortunately, a cogent approach to the identification of risk factors and prevention of chronic conduct problem display has not been developed. This project was an initial longitudinal assessment examining the merits of preventative behavioral parent training as a primary prevention strategy for at-risk children. Results demonstrated that prevention participants were engaging in normative rates of disruptive behaviors at 6-month follow-up, whereas comparison children showed a behavioral decline over time.     

Childhood and Offense-Related Trauma in Young People Imprisoned in England and Wales for Murder and Other Acts of Serious Violence: A Descriptive Study

This study describes the prevalence of traumatic childhood experiences and the extent of trauma-related symptomatology in a group of incarcerated young men within the Young People’s prison estate in England. Semistructured interviews using the Trauma History Interview, the Intrusions and Ruminations Interview, and the Impact of Events Scale–Revised were conducted with 34 young men aged 15 to 17 years who had either murdered or committed serious violence and were serving indeterminate or long-term sentences. Many of the young men had experienced high levels of childhood trauma, and some were still experiencing trauma related to the committal of their offenses approximately 18 months after their offenses had been committed. This is an important finding in relation to the prevalence of unrecognized and untreated traumatized young prisoners.     

The Role of Protestant Christianity in Young Adult Realistic Fiction

From a historical perspective, the United States has, from its inception, been a country where religion, politics, and literature were closely linked. Early publications were religious tracts and children learned to read using the Bible and other religious works. Religious influence into the culture and politics of the country has increased dramatically since the 1980s and the question arises as to whether this influence is being seen in young adult literature of the period. Therefore, a look at modern realistic fiction must begin by looking at the history of children's and young adult literature produced by mainstream publishers in the United States.     

Doing Childhoods in the Context of HIV and AIDS: Young Children in Early Schooling Speak

This study investigated children's experiences and understandings of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Grade 3 children (n=31) from the province of KwaZulu-Natal aged between 8–11 years were participants in the study. Data were collected through a four-stage focus group process including activities such as diagrammatic mapping, drawing, timelines, projective techniques and ranking exercises. The findings suggest that the meanings children make about HIV and AIDS are contextual and situational. Moreover, the contexts in which children live act as power sites where struggles over meaning and meaning making occur.     

Models of Educational Career With and Without IQ Measurements

Path models of educational careers do not usually contain information about phenotypical intelligence levels. This may lead to an overestimation of direct environmental effects such as the educational level of the parents on the education attained by the children. This phenomenon was investigated on the basis of data describing educational level, occupational status, and intelligence measurements of 2,847 father-son pairs. The IQ was determined during testing for military service by means of a shortened version of Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. The results were twofold. When the son's IQ was included in the model describing his educational career, environmental effects due to the influence of the father were reduced. Adding the father's IQ to the model, however, did not affect the path coefficients of the variables that were predicted to be relevant for the son's education.     

Informed Outcomes: Self-rating measures and their use in psychodynamic therapy with adolescents

I am currently engaged in an A Space ¹ 1. A Space for Creative Learning and Support was set up as a research and development project in 1997 by The Glass-House Trust (a Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust), the Social Science Research Unit (Institute of Education, University of London) and Hackney Education. A core aim is to deliver psychodynamic therapies in the school setting, adapting and evolving current models of child and adolescent psychotherapy, where necessary, both in response to the educational context and to ensure that the needs of children and adolescents are best met. In 2010, A Space and The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, began a formal study into school-based therapy. Funded by The Glass-House Trust, this research will run through to 2013. A conference will be held in 2013, so that the findings can be more widely disseminated. /University of Essex research study looking at the ways in which psychodynamic counselling can best meet the needs of young people accessing therapy in the school setting. As part of the study, I have looked at the main outcome measures used in work with adolescents in clinics, the community and voluntary sector and in education settings. In this article, I look at the process of assessment, including the use of written self-rating outcome measures with young people. I critically review a selection of these and reflect on their application in practice. I go on to consider how collaborative written assessment procedures may be more appropriate for use by psychodynamic therapists working with school-based clients, given the challenges of delivering therapy in the education sector.     

Adverse childhood experiences,religious/spiritual struggles,and mental health symptoms: examination of mediation models

Emerging research has documented greater risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression among young adults with prior adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Building upon prior findings, we hypothesised that religious/spiritual (R/S) struggles may serve as an intervening pathway through which accumulation of ACEs impacts mental health symptom severity in this population. Young adults (N?=?458) were recruited from a southeastern university to complete an online self-report survey that assessed for ACEs, lifetime trauma exposure, R/S struggles, PTSD and depressive symptomatology. Bivariate correlations yielded significant positive relationships between ACEs and all six types of R/S struggles, depression, and PTSD. Additionally, when accounting for non-childhood trauma exposure, the mediational analyses indicated an indirect effect of struggles with ultimate meaning on the well-establish association between ACEs and mental health symptoms. Clinical implications (such as the importance of fostering meaning making), study limitations, and future research directions are discussed.     

Locating experience in time and place: a look at young adult fiction and spiritual intelligence

Spiritual intelligence describes self-awareness and intuition, with the development of creative thinking, compassion and connectedness with others. Many researchers point to an awakening and development of spiritual intelligence that is enhanced through exploration of existential questions within the genre of young adult fiction. Such literature absorbs the adolescent reader so that they become transported into the narrative, exploring a sense of self and of others This article discusses the ways in which young adult fiction, including comparison of a novel of older context (An Episode of Sparrows) with contemporary dystopian fiction (The Maze Runner), can foster young adults’ exploration of self-awareness and cultivate the continued development of notions of connectedness, justice and responsibility. It describes current research on the relationship between spiritual intelligence in young adults and the narrative transportation effect of young adult fiction.     

Why are Extraverts more Satisfied? Personality,Social Experiences,and Subjective Well‐being in College

It is widely appreciated that extraversion is associated with greater subjective well‐being. What is not yet clear is what mechanisms relate the two. In two longitudinal studies, we explored whether extraversion is prospectively associated with higher levels of satisfaction during college through influencing college social experiences using longitudinal cross‐lagged mediation models. In both studies, students' extraversion at the beginning of college predicted their subjective well‐being 4 years later. In both studies, extraversion at the beginning of college predicted a variety of self‐reported and peer‐reported social experiences (e.g. feelings of belonging and size of social network). We tested whether qualitative or quantitative aspects of social experiences explained the association between extraversion and subjective well‐being. In the first study, neither type of social experience explained the effect of extraversion on satisfaction. Only qualitative social experiences in the second study were instrumental in explaining this effect. The results suggest that extraversion's ability to create better social experiences can play a role in extraverts' greater subjective well‐being, but these experiences are not the only reason extraverts are happier and more satisfied. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology