Objective: Findings about the association of left-handedness and ADHD are inconsistent. While abnormal brain laterality is reported in children with ADHD, it is unclear if hand preference is associated with ADHD, severity symptoms, age, gender, comorbid psychiatric problems, or parental characteristics. Method: Subjects were 520 boys and girls…

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 10-24-year-olds and the target of school-based prevention efforts. Gatekeeper training, a broadly disseminated prevention strategy, has been found to enhance participant knowledge and attitudes about intervening with distressed youth. Although the goal of training is the development of gatekeeper…

Objectives: Attempts to understand the effects of maltreatment subtypes on childhood functioning are complicated by the fact that children often experience multiple subtypes. This study assessed the effects of maltreatment subtypes on the cognitive, academic, and mental health functioning of preadolescent youth in out-of-home care using both…

Objective: Little is known about the mental health care received by young people after an episode of deliberate self-harm. This study examined predictors of emergency department (ED) discharge, mental health assessments in the ED, and follow-up outpatient mental health care for Medicaid-covered youth with deliberate self-harm. Method: A…

Social competence is essential for successful performance in school and life. Siedentop (1980) suggested that physical education settings and related activities may serve as useful vehicles for improving pro-social skills and values. Physical education literature draws a clear distinction between educating about, in, and through movement (Arnold,…

The integration of expressive activities in play groups with preadolescents encourages them to reach more deeply into their own resources, enabling them to handle future challenges more effectively. Developmental and therapeutic rationale, along with research support, is given for the integration of creative activities into a humanistic play group…

The transtheoretical model (TTM; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) suggests that, at any point, an individual is in one of five stages-of-change related to adopting a behavior. People sequentially advance in stage but may also maintain or even regress, based on personal and environmental factors (Nigg, 2005). A classic study published in…

We examined the relations between parental interpersonal sensitivity and youth social problems and explored the mediational role of child emotion dysregulation. Mothers (N = 42; M age = 39.38) and fathers (N = 41; M age = 39.38) of youth aged 7-12 (N = 42; M age = 9.12) completed measures of their own interpersonal sensitivity and reported on…

In the current study, we tested whether school connectedness mediates more distal deficits in social skills in influencing depressive symptoms in a sample of 127 sixth- and seventh-grade students. Results demonstrated that school connectedness and social skills accounted for 44% and 26% of variance in depressive symptoms respectively and 49% in a…

Theory of mind (ToM) development by a sample of 63 children aged 5-12 years (24 with Asperger syndrome, 19 with high-functioning autism, and 20 age-matched typical developers) was assessed with a five-task false-belief battery in relation to both lexical (vocabulary) and syntactic (grammar) language skills. Contrary to some previous research, no…

Whether gender differences exist in the impairment associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is still largely unknown, because most samples have few affected girls or include only one sex. The current study evaluated whether ADHD affects adjustment differently for girls than boys in a population-based cohort of 11-year-olds…

Peer victimization, or bullying, has been identified as a significant child health priority and children with language impairment (LI) are among those who are vulnerable. Given the mandate of educators to provide support for "all" students who are bullied regardless of language status, research is needed that integrates the study of risk factors…

The Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS) is a 38-item self-report questionnaire which measures symptoms of DSM-IV anxiety disorders in children and adolescents. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Greek translation of SCAS in a large community sample of children and adolescents (N = 1,072), aged 12-17 years, in the…

This study examined the relation between cognitive deficits and positive bias in a sample of 272 children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; 7-12 years old). Results indicated that children with ADHD with and without biased self-perceptions exhibit differences in specific cognitive deficits (executive processes,…

Trauma theory suggests that to recover from exposure to traumatic events, such as exposure to violence, therapeutic interventions should include opportunities to disclose and to process the fearful and stressful events. Yet little is known about the circumstances that foster disclosure of such information in therapeutic environments by children…