Child psychiatry and human development
-
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Dec 2020
Psychometric Properties of the Portuguese Version of the Child Post-traumatic Cognitions Inventory in a Sample of Children and Adolescents Following a Wildfire Disaster.
This study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the Child Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI) in a sample of Portuguese children and adolescents, following the exposition to a wildfire disaster. The sample included 533 children and adolescents living in regions exposed to the wildfire disaster (non-clinical sample: n = 483; clinical sample: n = 50). ⋯ The clinical sample presented significantly higher CPTCI scores than the non-clinical sample. These results contribute to the cross-cultural validation of the CPTCI and support the adequacy of its short form as a reliable and valid measure to be used with Portuguese children and adolescents.
-
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Oct 2020
Initial Challenges of Caregiving During COVID-19: Caregiver Burden, Mental Health, and the Parent-Child Relationship.
Research confirms that the mental health burdens following community-wide disasters are extensive, with pervasive impacts noted in individuals and families. It is clear that child disaster outcomes are worst among children of highly distressed caregivers, or those caregivers who experience their own negative mental health outcomes from the disaster. The current study used path analysis to examine concurrent patterns of parents' (n = 420) experience from a national sample during the early months of the U. ⋯ Results indicate significant linkages between parents' caregiver burden, mental health, and perceptions of children's stress; these in turn are significantly linked to child-parent closeness and conflict, indicating possible spillover effects for depressed parents and compensatory effects for anxious parents. The impact of millions of families sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic for an undefined period of time may lead to unprecedented impacts on individuals' mental health with unknown impacts on child-parent relationships. These impacts may be heightened for families whose caregivers experience increased mental health symptoms, as was the case for fathers in the current sample.
-
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Dec 2019
Attention to Peer Feedback Through the Eyes of Adolescents with a History of Anxiety and Healthy Adolescents.
During adolescence, youth may experience heightened attention bias to socially relevant stimuli; however, it is unclear if attention bias toward social threat may be exacerbated for adolescents with a history of anxiety. This study evaluated attentional bias during the Chatroom-Interact task with 25 adolescents with a history of anxiety (18F, Mage = 13.6) and 22 healthy adolescents (13F, Mage = 13.8). ⋯ Social feedback was associated with greater pupillary reactivity, an index of cognitive and emotional neural processing, compared to non-feedback cues. During acceptance feedback (but not during rejection feedback), anxious youth displayed greater pupil response compared to healthy youth, suggesting that positive feedback from peers may differentially influence youth with a history of an anxiety disorder.
-
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Oct 2015
Parental Anxiety Prospectively Predicts Fearful Children's Physiological Recovery from Stress.
Parental anxiety confers risk for the development of an anxiety disorder in children, and this risk may be transmitted through children's stress reactivity. Further, some children may be more vulnerable to reactivity in the presence of parent factors such as anxiety. In this study, we examined whether parents' anxiety symptoms prospectively predict school-aged children's physiological reactivity following stress, assessed through their electrodermal activity (galvanic skin response) during recovery from a performance challenge task, and whether this varies as a function of children's temperamental fearfulness. ⋯ Greater parental anxiety symptom severity at Time 1 predicted children's higher electrodermal response during both recovery tasks following the failure task. Further, these effects are specific to children with medium and high fearful temperament, whereas for children low in fearfulness, the association between parent anxiety and child reactivity is not significant. Findings provide additional evidence for the diathesis-stress hypothesis and are discussed in terms of their contribution to the literature on developmental psychopathology.
-
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev · Jun 2015
Peer victimization among children and adolescents with anxiety disorders.
This study examined peer victimization among a sample of youth who were seeking treatment at an outpatient anxiety disorders clinic. The study examined the association between peer victimization and internalizing symptoms and looked at whether frequent victimization was more common among youth with Social Phobia (SoP) as compared to youth with other anxiety disorders The study also examined the relation between SoP and peer victimization dimensionally. Participants were 90 youth (47 boys; M age = 11.06 years) and their parents. ⋯ Negative beliefs about the peer group accounted for some of this relation. Victimization was associated with symptomatology rather than diagnosis. Peer victimization is important to assess and consider in the treatment of anxiety disorders in youth.