Providing individual and group counseling has become an identified role for school psychologists working in the school setting. There is an extensive research base that highlights positive outcomes and supports the use of a variety of counseling methods when working with children and adolescents. However, there may exist a host of other outcomes,…

The present study examines the role of family resources (parenting style and family cohesion) and paternal history of substance abuse on the psychosocial adjustment of their school-aged children. Data were collected from 148 children aged 8-11 (72 of fathers with history of substance use disorder, 76 children of fathers with no substance use…

Reviews substance abuse disorders in schizophrenia patients, including prevalence of comorbid disorders, assessment, hypothesized mechanisms underlying abuse, and clinical effects of abuse on course of illness and cognitive functioning. Outlines principles of treatment for dual-diagnosis schizophrenia patients, noting limitations of existing…

Patients in treatment for substance-use disorders tend to smoke at higher rates than the general population. However, despite the fact such patients may be interested in smoking cessation and have been shown to be able to quit successfully without jeopardizing their sobriety, clinicians are often reluctant to advise their patients to stop smoking.…

The current study examined mental health symptomology, substance use, and adaptive coping among 416 social work students following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Among participants, 47% scored at or above the clinical level for depression, with 6% of students showing clinical PTSD-like symptoms, and 16.9% reporting substance use. Two thirds (66.9%)…

Objective: To determine the rate and risk of clinical and personality disorders diagnosed in childhood and adulthood in those known to have been sexually abused during childhood. Methods: Forensic medical records of 2,759 sexually abused children assessed between 1964 and 1995 were linked with a public psychiatric database between 12 and 43 years…

Despite media attention to teen sexual behavior and public concern about its consequences, the public is surprisingly ill-informed or misinformed on the subject. Yet without the facts, it is difficult to develop effective approaches to curb risky sexual behaviors and prevent teen pregnancy and STI transmission. This paper presents a true or false…

The objectives of this paper are two-fold: to examine first, if the change from positive to negative alcohol and any other substance use status from baseline assessment to the onset of the first session (i.e., pre-treatment phase) occurs in adolescents, that is, Assessment Reactivity (AR); second, whether AR predicts treatment outcome.…

As the transition to adulthood becomes more protracted and less orderly, fewer young people occupy adult roles and experience the social control associated with these roles. One might therefore expect behaviors associated with the teenage years to spill over into older age groups, reflecting postponed entrance into full social adulthood. We test…

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is associated with suicide, violence, and risk-taking behavior and can slow response to first-line treatment for Axis I disorders. ASPD may be assessed infrequently because few efficient diagnostic tools are available. This study evaluated 2 promising self-report measures for assessing ASPD--the ASPD scale of…

Youth who are homeless and gay, lesbian or bisexual (GLB) are one of the most disenfranchised and marginalized groups in our society. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare HIV in GLB homeless youth with their heterosexual counterparts. Participants for this study included 268 youth involved in treatment outcome studies with substance…

The set of statistical methods available to developmentalists is continually being expanded, allowing for questions about change over time to be addressed in new, informative ways. Indeed, new developments in methods to model change over time create the possibility for new research questions to be posed. Latent transition analysis, a longitudinal…

Objective: Despite the widely held belief that abuse is a risk factor for childhood firesetting, the role of maltreatment in firesetting is largely unexplored. This study reports on a sample of children and adolescents referred to a brief assessment and intervention program for juvenile firesetters. Firesetting histories of maltreated youth were…

This article presents a re-conceptualization of moderate adolescent drug use. It is argued that experimentation with alcohol and other drugs during the teenage years may play an important role in the development of regulatory competency in relation to drug consumption in adulthood. When such regulatory skills fail to emerge in young people, during…

Extinction, a form of learning that has the ability to reshape learned behavior based on new experiences, has been heavily studied utilizing fear learning paradigms. Mechanisms underlying extinction of positive-valence associations, such as drug self-administration and place preference, are poorly understood yet may have important relevance to…