Background: Caregivers play a crucial role in supporting trauma-affected foster children by offering emotional stability and comfort. Caregivers face significant emotional, practical and systemic challenges despite their critical contributions. Limited research explores their experiences in providing trauma-informed care, creating a gap in…

Children's experiences of animal fears can be caused by direct conditioning, experiencing negative events, or modeling others' fears or situations. The fear of an animal that develops in a child as a result of various experiences may turn into an animal phobia over time. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of EMDR interventions for two…

Discussions of trauma-informed practices tend to focus on student behaviors and strategies for managing those behaviors, rather than the circumstances students are experiencing. Critical educators have expressed concern that a focus on trauma-informed practices lead teachers to view students from marginalized backgrounds with a deficit lens,…

Children exposed to family violence (i.e. child abuse and neglect and intimate partner violence) are often emotionally insecure in their relationship with their parents, and develop psychosocial problems. Emotional insecurity increases the likelihood of psychosocial problems, and may affect adjustment in other contexts (e.g., school). Among…

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New…

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck Japan on 11 March 2011 leaving more than 400,000 people, including 100,000 children, homeless. These displaced children lived in temporary housing and 'temporarily' attended schools, which provided them with professional mental health support after the disaster. This paper highlights the role of…

Contact from the police to advise a parent that their child has come into conflict with the law can be devastating. Of the 904 individuals formally referred to youth justice services in Northern Ireland during 2020-21, one-quarter were reoffences. Most will involve boys' aged 15 plus years with numbers reflecting the wider UK prevalence. Whilst…

The number of migrants around the world has increased over the last decade, which can be attributed, in part, to increased violence from wars in the Middle East (Böhm et al., 2018; Hahnefeld, 2021; Reavell & Fazil, 2017; USA for UNHCR, 2022). About half of refugees are children (Amnesty International, 2022). These children are at risk of…

Objectives: Extant studies document a prospective link between early childhood trauma and internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression. Less is known regarding specific cognitive-affective mechanisms. The current study sought to examine distress intolerance (DI) as a mechanism that may explain the relation between early childhood…

Flexibility is often associated with resilience from adversity. Youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at risk of stress and trauma yet have inherent difficulties with flexibility, including rigid behaviors, routines, "insistence on sameness," and lack of social reciprocity. This review highlights literature of physiological and…

This study examined the relationship between polyvictimization, psychological distress, and trauma symptoms in college men and women. Childhood victimization was common among participants. Regression analyses revealed that polyvictimization (i.e., high cumulative levels of victimization) is a better predictor of psychological distress and trauma…

Research documenting the effects of trauma in early childhood describes the profound and long-term consequences of child abuse and neglect on the developing brain and the subsequent deficits in critical cognitive and social development. While educators have increasingly endeavoured to understand this impact and become more 'trauma-informed' in…

The current study investigates how internalizing and externalizing problems develop reciprocally across infancy to middle childhood, in relation to children's gender, cognitive functioning, socioeconomic status, and parental stress. The study also examines the impact of the developmental cascade of internalizing and externalizing problems on…

This study examines the relationship between levels of exposure to war and the psychological symptoms on the well-being of displaced children at Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. One hundred and thirty-three parents of children aged 0-12 years completed a survey that measures exposure to violence, and the impact of such exposure. The findings…

Objective: The aim of this study is to examine the concurrent validity of the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children (TSCC) using associated behavioral health diagnoses. Methods: The sample included 2,544 youth participating in a juvenile justice diversion program for youth with behavioral health issues. Youth received a full diagnostic assessment…