Objective: Our goal was to determine whether behavioral economic constructs--including impulsivity (i.e., steep discounting of delayed food and monetary rewards), the relative reinforcing value of food (RRV[subscript food]), and environmental enrichment (i.e., the presence of alternatives to unhealthy foods in the home and neighborhood…

Objective: The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991, 2003) is often used to assess risk of violence, perhaps based on the assumption that it captures emotionally detached individuals who are driven to prey upon others. This study is designed to assess the relation between (a) core interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy and…

Objective: Using a longitudinal design, the authors of this study examined the relationship between externalizing problems and impulsivity in early childhood and symptoms of disordered eating in late adolescence. Method: Participants were urban, African American first-grade girls (N = 119) and their parents who were participating in a longitudinal…

Designated 100 psychiatrically hospitalized and 114 nonhospitalized adolescents as impulsive or nonimpulsive and compared them to determine the validity of signs of impulsivity on the Draw-A-Person and Bender Gestalt tests. Signs of impulsivity and nonimpulsivity on these tests discriminated between impulsive and nonimpulsive adolescents with…

Compared mothers who had a history of child abuse, child neglect, or no maltreatment and their preschool children on impulsiveness in a multimodal assessment procedure. Results indicated that comparison mothers performed better than did abusing mothers on two measures of motor inhibition. Neglectful mothers rated their children as having more…

Findings support the effectiveness of an integration of cognitive and behavioral procedures for developing self-control in children and suggest the relative superiority of the conceptual approach to cognitive-behavioral treatment. (Author)

Comparison of the modes of training showed that reflectively counseled mothers improved primarily in parent attitudes, whereas behaviorally trained mothers improved primarily in actual use of appropriate behavioral skills, reporting reductions in problematic child behavior and improvements in overall family functioning. (Author)

A 9-year-old impulsive boy was treated with a combination of verbal self-instructions and response cost. The program was sequentially applied to inappropriate "switches" in each of three target behaviors (topics, games, rules) according to a multiple baseline design. Positive change in all of the target behaviors was evident at posttreatment.…

Compared the Matching Familiar Figures Test performances of 53 children in grades five and six, identified as being depressed, to performances of 53 nondepressed children. The depressed group had longer latencies, made more errors, and was less efficient, even when intellectual differences were taken into account. (Author)