In this article, a former troubled youth who is now an expert on resilience shares his experience and provides youth a guided exercise in turning their own lives around. The ex-juvenile delinquent stresses the importance of setting goals claiming that goals are things to shoot for, like getting your chores done or saving your money to buy a car.…

Examined in this article is whether it is ethical for health educators to try to change the health behaviors of people who are informed about the risks of engaging in an unhealthy behavior, have the skills and confidence to change the behavior, but nevertheless choose not to change. Questions are raised about whether interventions for such…

An international movement has focused on identifying evidence-based interventions that were developed to change psychological constructs and that are supported by controlled studies. However, inconsistent findings within individual intervention studies and among multiple studies raise critical problems in interpreting the evidence, and deciding…

This study investigated the roles of sex, age, and parent-child communication in moderating the association between digital game violence and direct aggression in a two-year longitudinal study. Finnish 12- and 15-year-old adolescents (N = 316) participated in the follow-up survey. As hypothesized, digital game violence was linked to direct…

This study reports on an intervention involving massage, yoga and relaxation delivered to young children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Children (n = 126) were invited to participate in the Self-discovery Programme (SDP) with parental consent. A total of 107 children aged 8-11 years completed the SDP and all measures. Children were…

Objective: To assess weight changes, exercise and diet behaviors among college students from the beginning of freshman year until the end of senior year. Design: Longitudinal observational study. Setting: Private university in St. Louis, Missouri. Participants: College students (138 females, 66 males). Main Outcome Measures: Weight and height were…

A new approach to the measurement of mentalizing is introduced. Instead of measuring the presence or absence of mentalizing capacity, the current study aimed at developing a mentalizing task that focuses on investigating biases in mentalizing through the use of ambiguous peer-related social scenarios. The response consistency of 659 children was…

Participants provided information pertaining to managing non-task-related behavior of students during large group guidance lessons. In particular, school counselors were asked often how often they provide large group guidance, the frequency of which students exhibit off-task and/or disruptive behavior during guidance lessons, and techniques they…

In intervention research, treatment fidelity is defined as the strategies that monitor and enhance the accuracy and consistency of an intervention to ensure it is implemented as planned and that each component is delivered in a comparable manner to all study participants over time. Reviews of the literature in special education and other…

The "Ohio Youth Problems, Functioning, and Satisfaction Scales" (Ohio Scales) are a recently developed set of measures designed to be a brief, practical assessment of changes in behavior over time in children and adolescents. The authors explored the convergent validity of the Ohio Scales by examining the relationship between the scales and…

For the study reported here, the authors used growth mixture modeling to analyze changes in alcohol and marijuana use and the use of drug and alcohol treatment services for a sample of 180 adolescents with serious emotional disturbance (ages 12-14 years at the beginning of the 7-year longitudinal study). Three latent classes of substance users…

This research assessed effects of brief wilderness programs on adolescents' self-concepts, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and environmental attitudes and contrasted effects for adolescents in five racial groups. A pretest-posttest design compared adolescents who participated in wilderness outings (n = 67) with adolescents on a waiting…

Research shows that after training in the philosophy and practice of mindfulness, parents can mindfully attend to the challenging behaviors of their children with autism. Parents also report an increased satisfaction with their parenting skills and social interactions with their children. These findings were replicated and extended with four…

Two interpretive case studies are reported that investigate the intentionality of defensiveness versus open-mindedness in persons who hold flawed ideological beliefs. The 1st analyzes an academic authority's resistance to information that disconfirms a therapeutic intervention that he has been successfully promoting. His dissociation and…

Crisis intervention requires that the person experiencing crisis receive timely and skillful support to help cope with his/her situation before future physical or emotional deterioration occurs. This Digest provides a brief, conceptual overview of crisis intervention, and summarizes the steps a worker may use to assist an individual experiencing…