Enhancing the parent-child relationship: a Hong Kong community-based randomized controlled trial.

Adolescence is a critical risk period for negative academic and behavioral outcomes, but a strong parent-child relationship can be a powerful protective factor. Our previous pilot of an academic-community agency collaborative randomized controlled trial (RCT) demonstrated initial evidence of benefit for a parenting intervention with preadolescents in Hong Kong. The present RCT assessed the effect of brief training in positive discipline parenting skills on parental satisfaction with the parent-child relationship. A community sample of 461 Hong Kong Chinese parents of children aged 10-13 years were randomized to (a) the Harmony@Home intervention, (b) an attention control, or (c) a third active intervention that shared the control group. Participants were followed for 12 months and multiple methods of assessment were used. Compared with the control group, the Harmony@Home group reported an increase in the primary outcome of satisfaction with the parent-child relationship at 3 months' postintervention. Although results are mixed, this study demonstrates how a culturally adaptive community intervention can improve the parental behaviors that serve as protective factors against negative academic and behavioral outcomes for Chinese adolescents.

Faux pas deficits in people with medial frontal lesions as related to impaired understanding of a speaker's mental state.

This study examined the nature of deficits in mentalizing, the ability to read the mental state of other people, as measured by a faux pas task in people with medial frontal lesions. A total of 56 Mandarin-speaking Chinese individuals participated (9 participants with medial frontal lesions, 12 participants with lateral frontal lesions, 5 participants with non-frontal lesions, and 30 healthy controls). The faux pas test ascertained the participants' ability to identify and understand a social faux pas, and to understand the mental states of the characters (the speaker and the recipient in a conversation with a social faux pas). Although the participants with medial frontal lesions performed less well than the other clinical participants and the control participants on all aspects of the faux pas test, the most significant deficit was observed in understanding mental states and hence inferring the speaker's intentions. The performance on the various aspects of decoding a social faux pas by people with medial frontal lesions suggests that the cognitive processes, and hence the respective neural correlates subserving these various processes, may be different. Our results add to existing literature and illustrate the very nature of deficits of mentalizing, measured by a faux pas test, experienced by people with medial frontal lesions. The data have also prompted that future behavioral and neuroimaging studies may be applied to further decode both the neural mechanisms and the cognitive variables affecting "mentalizing".