The present meta-analysis examined the effects of psychosocial treatments at reducing deleterious outcomes of sexual abuse. The meta-analysis included a total of 35 published and unpublished studies written in English, focusing on youth under the age of 18, and evaluating the effectiveness of treatments for the most common negative outcomes of sexual abuse: PTSD symptoms, externalizing problems...

A community-based intervention with specific factors for children and parents exposed to interparental violence (IPV) was compared with a control intervention based on non-specific factors. We hypothesized that participation in an intervention with specific factors, focused on IPV, parenting and coping, would be associated with better recovery. IPV exposed children and parents were group random...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the stability of behavioural and developmental problems as children develop from infants to toddlers in the general population. Therefore, we investigated behavioural profiles at two time points and determined whether behaviours are stable during early development. METHODS Parents of 4,237 children completed questionnaires with 62 items about externalizing, in...

In postconflict settings risk factors at multiple levels of the social ecology, including community, family, and relationship factors, potentially affect children's mental health. In addition, intergenerational risk factors such as guardians' history of childhood family violence, war exposure, and psychopathology may contribute to children's psychopathological symptoms. In this study, we aimed ...

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline Factor analyses among adults have indicated that the structure of common mental disorders may be described parsimoniously with a two factor model, with mood and anxiety disorders loading on a...

The present study investigated whether cortisol stress responses of 6-year-olds were associated with their behavioral functioning at school. Additionally, the moderating role of stress in the family environment was examined. To this end, 149 healthy children (Mage  = 6.09 years; 70 girls) participated in an age-appropriate innovative social evaluative stress test. Saliva cortisol samples were c...

The present study evaluated the role of expressed emotion (EE) as a predictor of child symptomatology and functional impairment in a sample of nearly 800 adolescent children of mothers with varying histories of depression or who were nondepressed. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized associations in half of the sample, and all models were cross-validated on the other h...

This study examined the interplay between interparental conflict and child cortisol reactivity to interparental conflict in predicting child maladjustment in a sample of 178 families and their kindergarten children. Consistent with the allostatic load hypothesis (McEwen & Stellar, 1993), results indicated that interparental conflict was indirectly related to child maladjustment through its asso...

Examined relations among family instability and adolescent's psychological functioning using family models of children's emotional security in a sample of 220 young adolescents and their primary caregivers. Primary caregiver reports of family instability were associated with multiple informant measures of adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Findings from structural equation mod...

Reviews summarizing hundreds of studies cite parent management training (PMT) and cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) as some of the most effective interventions for aggressive youth. However, studies continue to report variability in outcomes, and researchers have yet to understand why certain interventions only produce behavior change in some children. Using a clinical sample of 57 children (53 ...