Caregiving for children through conflict and displacement: a pilot study testing the feasibility of delivering and evaluating a light touch parenting intervention for caregivers in the West Bank

A child's adjustment to wartime stress is reliant not only on individual responses and qualities, but very significantly on the availability of support that they may receive from their parent or caregivers and quality of relationships. Strengthening parental support has the potential to be valuable. A pilot two-arm randomised controlled trial investigated the feasibility of delivering and evaluating the “Caring for Children Through Conflict and Displacement” intervention with caregivers in the West Bank. Feasibility to recruit and train non-specialist staff on-the-ground to screen families for eligibility, collect outcome data, deliver the intervention and to recruit and retain families in the study were examined. Research staff and intervention facilitators were successfully appointed in the field, screened participants and delivered the intervention to 120 caregivers, collecting outcome measures pre-and post-delivery. All families completed the outcome measures, with very little missing data. This indicated that the intervention can be delivered feasibly and evaluated with families in this humanitarian context. Preliminary outcome data showed promise that the intervention may have the potential to both improve family functioning and reduce children's problem behaviour. Implications of family-focused initiatives, particularly within a conflict/post-conflict context for the prevention of several negative health and social outcomes directions, are discussed.     

Loving and angry? Happy and sad? Understanding and reporting of mixed emotions in mother–child relationships by 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds

The Evaluative Space Model of emotions allows for the coactivation of positive‐appetitive and negative‐avoidant systems, but few studies have examined mixed emotions in child development. Existing research suggests children's understanding of opposite valence emotion combinations emerges by approximately 11 years of age. However, it is not yet clear whether various opposite valence combinations are understood at different ages, nor whether children can understand them in others before they have experienced such mixed emotions themselves. Semi‐structured interviews with 97 children investigated whether they regarded six combinations of opposite valence mixed emotions as possible, could provide reasons for them, and report their own experience of each in the context of mother–child relationships. Both understanding that such combinations are possible and ability to provide reasons for them increased after age 6 and up to age 11, but were still incomplete in 12‐year‐olds. Understanding of different opposite valence combinations developed at different rates. At each age, fewer children who showed understanding of these combinations in others reported having had a similar experience themselves. The findings suggest a need to systematically examine a range of mixed emotions in order to develop a comprehensive theory of the development of mixed emotion understanding. They also suggest extending research into adolescence.     

The effects of self‐explaining when learning with text or diagrams

Self‐explaining is an effective metacognitive strategy that can help learners develop deeper understanding of the material they study. This experiment explored if the format of material (i.e., text or diagrams) influences the self‐explanation effect. Twenty subjects were presented with information about the human circulatory system and prompted to self‐explain; 10 received this information in text and 10 in diagrams. Results showed that students given diagrams performed significantly better on post‐tests than students given text. Diagrams students also generated significantly more self‐explanations that text students. Furthermore, the benefits of self‐explaining were much greater in the diagrams condition. To discover why diagrams can promote the self‐explanation effect, results are interpreted with reference to the multiple differences in the semantic, cognitive and affective properties of the texts and diagrams studied.     

The heterogeneity of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms and conduct problems: Cognitive inhibition,emotion regulation,emotionality, and disorganized attachment

This study examined the contributions of several important domains of functioning to attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and conduct problems. Specifically, we investigated whether cognitive inhibition, emotion regulation, emotionality, and disorganized attachment made independent and specific contributions to these externalizing behaviour problems from a multiple pathways perspective. The study included laboratory measures of cognitive inhibition and disorganized attachment in 184 typically developing children (M age = 6 years, 10 months, SD = 1.7). Parental ratings provided measures of emotion regulation, emotionality, and externalizing behaviour problems. Results revealed that cognitive inhibition, regulation of positive emotion, and positive emotionality were independently and specifically related to ADHD symptoms. Disorganized attachment and negative emotionality formed independent and specific relations to conduct problems. Our findings support the multiple pathways perspective on ADHD, with poor regulation of positive emotion and high positive emotionality making distinct contributions to ADHD symptoms. More specifically, our results support the proposal of a temperamentally based pathway to ADHD symptoms. The findings also indicate that disorganized attachment and negative emotionality constitute pathways specific to conduct problems rather than to ADHD symptoms.     

An investigation of planned helping behavior

It is argued that stable, individual differences in helping behavior have not generally been observed in previous research because of the type of helping studied. This paper advocates the study of planned helping behavior as opposed to spontaneous helping behavior. The results of three studies are reported. In Study 1, an instrument designed to measure level of involvement in planned helping activities was developed. Scores on this instrument were found to be stable over a 7-month period. Further analysis revealed two major types of planned helping: (a) formal, organizational helping and (b) informal helping between friends and family. Study 2 examined a variety of intrapsychic and demographic correlates of formal and informal planned helping. Study 3 found support for the hypothesis that people in helping professions have higher levels of involvement in everyday planned helping than do people in nonhelping occupations. It is concluded that the study of planned helping, although posing methodological difficulties, is a necessary adjunct to experimental research.     

The effects of recency and story content on children's moral judgments

Sixteen stories were read to children at ages 4, 7, and 11 years and to college freshmen (n = 24 per age level) to investigate the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning. The stories consisted of either positive or negative intention and either positive or negative consequence in one of four situations: rule breaking, property damage, property damage with peer interaction, or injury to a person. At each age level, half of the subjects heard the stories with the intention first and the consequence second, and half heard them in the reverse order. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, whereas older children utilized intention, and that on stories containing intentional injury to a person, the younger child took intention into account. Recency effects were evidenced for both the 4- and 7-year-olds. In the 4-year-old group, however, the recency effects failed to override the salience of negative consequence in contexts of positive intention and negative consequence. This suggests that preschool children may respond primarily to the negative aspect of the story, whether intention or consequence.     

A transnational family story: A narrative inquiry on the emotional and intergenerational notions of ‘home’

At the core of migratory experiences lie key questions pertaining to one's emotional changing Self: the complexity of conflicting identities, feelings of (un)belonging, varying degrees of emotional place (un)attachment, and the fundamental (re)conceptualizations of ‘home’. Though well-studied from various angles, ‘home’ as an emotional concept in the context of generational family migration research has many gains yet to be made. Through an in-depth study on three generations of one author's own family, this paper provides personal insight into the intergenerational and emotional dimensions of this topic. Unanimously, the findings demonstrate that notions of ‘home’ as where family is remain predominant, with ties to transnationally dispersed family members rendering ‘home’ as multiple. Places of familial heritage further remain central in conceptualizations of ‘home’ through a retainment of cultural practices and values derived from familial homelands. Despite these cross-generational similarities, challenges and emotional uncertainties on the topic are seen to be increasingly prevalent in the youngest generation. Above all, interviewees' post-migration reflections demonstrate that such conceptualizations are intricate, relational and do not exist in an emotional vacuum.     

An Application of Brief Therapy to Family Medicine

The Solution-Focused Brief Therapy model has been applied to support families with various problems commonly met at the department of family medicine in a large, urban teaching hospital in Seoul. Korea. Many cases there show a different distribution of problems when compared with a tertiary family therapy center. The majority involve psychosomatic problems, family distress around a chronically-ill member, the loss of a family member, and severe illness, only a few involving drinking problems, family violence, or abuse. The SFBT model meets the seven requirements of Doherty and Baird (1983) for a family therapy model to be useful in a medicine setting.     

Marcel's “availability” in existential psychotherapy with couples and families

Gabriel Marcel was a French, Catholic, existential philosopher who first presented the concept of human availability as a central way of strengthening the self and facilitating the experience of human freedom. In this article Marcel's ideas about availability are described, reviewed, and examined for their implications for the practice of existential psychotherapy with couples and families.