Contextual determinants of mothers' interventions in young children's peer interactions.

In this study, the role of context in mothers' interventions in their preschool children's peer relationship problems was investigated. Event theme (aggression, peer rebuff, or initiating play), the child's role in the event (actor or target), the child's age and sex, and the mother's emotional reaction were examined as predictors of the extent to which mothers (N = 71) said they would discuss peer relationships, encourage peer interaction, and use power assertion in response to a series of videotaped vignettes depicting common peer relationship problems. Mothers suggested using more discussion in aggressive situations and more encouragement in initiating play situations. Mothers said they would use more power assertion when the child was the actor (i.e., provocateur), rather than the target, in an aggressive situation. Findings are discussed in terms of (a) the importance of considering context in understanding how mothers intervene in their children's peer relationships and (b) the need to examine moderators of cross-contextual consistency in mothers' interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Comprehensive Review of Prevention Groups for Children and Adolescents.

Primary prevention has increasingly become a focus of the child and adolescent research literature over the past 25 years. Groups are a natural milieu within which to work with children and adolescents. The current research reviews the literature on child and adolescent prevention-oriented group interventions for the decade 1990-2000 to follow up the work of previous reviews in this area, identify current trends, and suggest future directions for the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acceptability and availability of harm-reduction interventions for drug abuse in American substance abuse treatment agencies.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 18(1) of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors (see record 2007-16711-001). On page 208, the first sentence in the note of Table 4 incorrectly reads as follows: "Numbers in parentheses are ns of respondents who provided an 'other' reason for this specific intervention." The sentence should read as follows: "Numbers in parentheses are ns of respondents whose agencies do not offer this intervention."] This study assessed acceptability, availability, and reasons for nonavailability of interventions designed to prevent drug use related harm by substituting pharmaceuticals for illicit drugs; facilitating detoxification; and reducing the occurrence of HIV transmission, relapse, and opiate overdose. A survey was mailed to a sample of 500 randomly selected American substance abuse treatment agencies. Of 435 potentially eligible respondents, 222 (51%) returned usable data. A subset of interventions--including harm reduction education, cue exposure therapy, needle exchange, substitute opiate prescribing, various detoxification regimes, and complementary therapies--were rated as somewhat or completely acceptable by 50% or more of the respondents. Regardless of their acceptability, listed interventions were generally not available from responding agencies; respondents typically attributed unavailability to lack of resources and inconsistency of an intervention with agency philosophy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health (REACH): Project design and baseline characteristics.

The Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health (REACH) project was designed to test promising interventions for enhancing family caregiving for persons with dementia. The purpose of this article is to describe the research design, interventions, and outcome measures used in REACH and to characterize the sample recruited for the study. Nine interventions and 2 control conditions were implemented at 6 sites; 1,222 dyads were randomly assigned to an intervention or a control condition. The caregiver sample was 18.6% male with an average age of 62.3 years (56% Caucasian, 24% Black, and 19% Hispanic). Caregivers reported high levels of depressive symptoms and moderate burden. Care recipients were older, with a mean age of 79, and were moderately to severely impaired with mean Mini-Mental State Exam scores of 13/30. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gender-sensitive recommendations for assessment and treatment of depression in men.

Psychologists increasingly recognize depression as a serious, albeit often undiagnosed, condition in men. In fact, undiagnosed and untreated depression in men may be one reason why many more men than women commit suicide. However, because of cultural conditioning that discourages expression of depressed mood in men, assessment as well as treatment of depression in men are sometimes difficult. Use of gender-sensitive assessment strategies and interventions will assure that more men will be identified and treated for depression. This article integrates scientific findings related to depression in men with specific gender-sensitive assessment and psychotherapeutic intervention strategies designed to enhance psychologists' skills in working with this significant problem in men. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparative outcome evaluations of psychotherapies: Guidelines for addressing eight limitations of the gold standard of causal inference.

Although randomized experiments represent the gold standard in causal research, their limitations are easily overlooked, especially in field experiments. Although discussions of the limitations of field experiments typically detail problems of design implementation, field experiments have limitations even if their randomized designs are successfully implemented. This is particularly true of comparative evaluations of psychotherapy programs. Accordingly, this article focuses on eight limitations that pervade such comparative treatment research: (a) Direct and indirect effects are conflated; (b) the investigation of interactions is limited; (c) attention is diverted from background conditions; (d) temporal factors complicate causal inferences; (e) the stable-unit-treatment-value assumption is easily violated; (f) therapist effects can confound therapy method effects; (g) differential effects of treatment methods are small; and (h) generalizability of treatment research findings is indeterminate. In addition to explaining each limitation, the author proposes research strategies for addressing it. The author concludes that attention to these 8 limitations and to the various strategies for overcoming them can increase increase the causal contribution of experimental evaluations of psychotherapies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward dissemination of evidence-based family interventions: Maintenance of community-based partnership recruitment results and associated factors.

A major challenge in the dissemination of evidence-based family interventions (EBFIs) designed to reduce youth substance use and other problem behaviors is effective and sustainable community-based recruitment. This understudied topic is addressed by a preliminary study of 14 community-university partnership teams randomly assigned to an intervention condition in which teams attempted sustained implementation of EBFIs with two cohorts of middle school families. This report describes attendance rates of recruited families maintained over time and across both cohorts, along with exploratory analyses of factors associated with those rates. When compared with community-based recruitment rates in the literature, particularly for multisession interventions, relatively high rates were observed; they averaged 17% across cohorts. Community team functioning (e.g., production of quality team promotional materials) and technical assistance (TA) variables (e.g., effective collaboration with TA, frequency of TA requests) were associated with higher recruitment rates, even after controlling for community and school district contextual influences. Results support the community-university partnership model for recruitment that was implemented in the study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A randomized trial of brief interventions for problem and pathological gamblers.

Limited research exists regarding methods for reducing problem gambling. Problem gamblers (N = 180) were randomly assigned to assessment only control, 10 min of brief advice, 1 session of motivational enhancement therapy (MET), or 1 session of MET plus 3 sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Gambling was assessed at baseline, at 6 weeks, and at a 9-month follow-up. Relative to assessment only, brief advice was the only condition that significantly decreased gambling between baseline and Week 6, and it was associated with clinically significant reductions in gambling at Month 9. Between Week 6 and Month 9, MET plus cognitive-behavioral therapy evidenced significantly reduced gambling on 1 index compared with the control condition. These results suggest the efficacy of a very brief intervention for reduction of gambling among problem and pathological gamblers who are not actively seeking gambling treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons: A comprehensive quantitative review.

Previous quantitative reviews of research on psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons have yielded divergent findings and have not included many of the available controlled outcome studies. This meta-analysis summarizes results from 61 controlled studies to offer a more comprehensive integration of this literature. This review examined (a) the absolute effectiveness of bereavement interventions immediately following intervention and at follow-up assessments, (b) several of the clinically and theoretically relevant moderators of outcome, and (c) change over time among recipients of the interventions and individuals in no-intervention control groups. Overall, analyses showed that interventions had a small effect at posttreatment but no statistically significant benefit at follow-up. However, interventions that exclusively targeted grievers displaying marked difficulties adapting to loss had outcomes that compare favorably with psychotherapies for other difficulties. Other evidence suggested that the discouraging results for studies failing to screen for indications of distress could be attributed to a tendency among controls to improve naturally over time. The findings of the review underscore the importance of attending to the targeted population in the practice and study of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)