Findings suggest that EFDs do not serve as trait markers for developing anxiety or depression but appear to be symptomatic of current disorder.

This study tests key tenets of the Adaptation to Poverty-related Stress Model. This model (Wadsworth, Raviv, Santiago, & Etter, 2011 ) builds on Conger and Elder's family stress model by proposing that primary control coping and secondary control coping can help reduce the negative effects of economic strain on parental behaviors central to the family stress model, namely, parental depressive symptoms and parent-child interactions, which together can decrease child internalizing and externalizing problems. Two hundred seventy-five co-parenting couples with children between the ages of 1 and 18 participated in an evaluation of a brief family strengthening intervention, aimed at preventing economic strain's negative cascade of influence on parents, and ultimately their children. The longitudinal path model, analyzed at the couple dyad level with mothers and fathers nested within couple, showed very good fit, and was not moderated by child gender or ethnicity. Analyses revealed direct positive effects of primary control coping and secondary control coping on mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms. Decreased economic strain predicted more positive father-child interactions, whereas increased secondary control coping predicted less negative mother-child interactions. Positive parent-child interactions, along with decreased parent depression and economic strain, predicted child internalizing and externalizing over the course of 18 months. Multiple-group models analyzed separately by parent gender revealed, however, that child age moderated father effects. Findings provide support for the adaptation to poverty-related stress model and suggest that prevention and clinical interventions for families affected by poverty-related stress may be strengthened by including modules that address economic strain and efficacious strategies for coping with strain.

OBJECTIVE: This random assignment experimental study examined the intersection of children’s coping and physiologic stress reactivity and recovery patterns in a sample of preadolescent boys and girls. METHOD: A sample of 82 fourth and fifth grade (Mage = 10.59 years old) child-parent dyads participated in the present study. Children participated in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST-C) and were randomly assigned to one of two post-TSST-C experimental coping conditions; behavioral distraction and cognitive avoidance. Children’s characteristic ways of coping were examined as moderators of the effect of experimental coping condition on cortisol reactivity and recovery patterns. RESULTS: Multi-level modeling analyses indicated that children’s characteristic coping and experimental coping condition interacted to predict differential cortisol recovery patterns. Children who characteristically engaged in primary control engagement coping strategies were able to more quickly down-regulate salivary cortisol when primed to distract themselves than when primed to avoid and vice versa. The opposite pattern was true for characteristic disengagement coping in the context of coping condition, suggesting that regulatory fit between children’s characteristic ways of coping and cues from their coping environment may lead to more and less adaptive physiologic recovery profiles. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides some of the first evidence that coping “gets under the skin” and that children’s characteristic ways of coping may constrain or enhance a child’s ability to make use of environmental coping resources.

The Child PTSD Symptom Scale (Foa, Johnson, Feeny, & Treadwell, ) is a self-report measure of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (PTSD) in children and adolescents. Despite widespread use of this measure, no study to our knowledge has examined its psychometric properties in Latino children. This study examined the factor structure, internal consistency, and convergent validity of the measure utilizing a sample of 161 Latino students (M = 11.42 years, SD = 0.70) at high risk of exposure to community violence. Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that a 3-factor model consistent with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, ) provided the best fit to the data. Internal consistency of the total scale and subscales was high when completed in English or Spanish. All Child PTSD Symptom Scale scores were positively correlated with violence exposure. As additional evidence of convergent validity, scores evidenced stronger correlations with internalizing symptoms than with externalizing symptoms. Results supported the use of the Child PTSD Symptom Scale as a measure of PTSD severity in Latino children, but additional research is needed to determine appropriate clinical cutoffs for Latino youths exposed to chronic levels of violence. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

Latinos have less access to culturally relevant and appropriate mental health services based in empirical research. For ethnic minority populations, culturally adapting empirically supported interventions has been identified as a successful method for motivating community interest, and increasing engagement and acceptability. The current article presents two studies: In Study 1, we describe the development of a research-based family strengthening intervention for low-income Latino families (FUERTE), following established methods of cultural adaptation. In Study 2, we present results from a pilot study designed to assess the feasibility and acceptability of implementing and evaluating FUERTE with nine low-income Spanish-speaking couples in a community Head Start setting, the acceptability of the program, and preliminary intervention effects. Participants completed 4 weeks of workshops and a pre-intervention and post-intervention assessment. Results provide evidence in support of the feasibility and acceptability of implementing FUERTE in a community setting. Preliminary pre- to post-improvements were noted across numerous domains; however, efficacy results are cautiously interpreted because of the small sample size. Future directions and implications of the current study results are discussed.

An experimenter presented familiar and bizarre action statements (e.g., "Rest on the fire hydrant" vs. "Shake hands with the fire hydrant") to a participant and confederate during a campus walk. They watched the experimenter perform half the actions and imagined the experimenter performing the other half. One day later, they took a second walk where actions were only imagined. Some actions from the first walk were repeated, and new actions were added. Two weeks later, the participant and confederate collaboratively recalled whether specific actions were presented in the first walk and, if so, whether they were imagined or performed. For different actions, the confederate was accurate, was inaccurate, or provided no information. When later tested individually, participants demonstrated imagination inflation by falsely remembering familiar and bizarre actions as performed on the first walk that were merely imagined on the second. These memory errors were greatly reduced if the confederate was accurate during collaborative recall.