The effects of anger management groups in a day school for emotionally disturbed adolescents.

Drawn from a day school for emotionally disturbed adolescents, seven students who scored in the clinical range on the Conduct subscale of the Conners Teacher Rating Scale took part in an anger management program. The program included psychoeducation, anger discrimination training, logging incidents of anger, and training in prosocial responses to anger. Pre-post assessments provided evidence of positive effects. The adolescents showed significant improvement on both the teacher (p<.03) and the parent (p<.04) versions of the Conduct subscale. They also exhibited a trend toward fewer incidents of physical aggression (p<.06). The implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

Parent and family support groups with African American families: the process of family and community empowerment.

This article describes a process of family and community empowerment in which psychologists, along with community, school and religious leaders, intervened on a multisystemic level and formed a parent and family support group to empower families in helping their at-risk adolescents to succeed. The adolescents, who were predominantly African American, had been arrested for fighting at school and were experiencing academic and behavioral difficulties. Critical incidents in the group development and the family and community empowerment process are described.

Booster sessions and long-term effects of behavioral family therapy on adolescent substance use and school performance.

This study investigated the long-term impact on adolescent substance use and academic failure of 6 months of booster sessions following the termination of behavioral family therapy. Subjects were four 14-16-year-old white and Hispanic males and females whose parents or teachers had referred them for 5-12 months of behavioral family therapy. The first subject received no booster sessions; after the typical decrease in substance use and academic problems at the end of treatment, his problems recurred and subsequently worsened during follow-up. The other three subjects responded similarly to behavioral family therapy, but this was followed by 6 months of booster sessions, leading to a second decrease in substance use and academic problems. Improvement was maintained throughout follow-up. These results suggest that booster sessions can prevent the recurrences of adolescent problem behavior that often follow treatment termination.

Overt and covert parental conflict and adolescent problems: observed marital interaction in clinic and nonclinic families.

When adolescents behave in socially unacceptable ways, overt interparental conflict is widely held to be the cause. Empirical studies, however, have been inconsistent in supporting this assumption. Some researchers therefore have speculated that covert conflict also plays a role. In the current observational study, evidence was found that both overt parental conflict and some forms of covert conflict play roles. During problem-solving family discussions, parents of adolescents whom they had brought into an outpatient clinic for treatment overtly disagreed with each other significantly more often than did parents with adolescents who did not require treatment. Families of clinic adolescents also exhibited significantly more silence during their discussions, and mothers spent significantly less time talking than did their nonclinic counterparts. The implications that both the overt and covert conflict may have for adolescent behavior are discussed.

A descriptive analysis of family discussions about everyday problems and decisions.

Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) and "An operant analysis of problem solving" (1966) were used to develop a coding system to analyze the relationships between verbal behaviors in family problem solving discussions. Taking solution statements as a target behavior, sequential relationships were examined with both subsequent and antecedent verbal behaviors, comparing families with higher and lower rates of solution statements. Results indicated that two categories of verbal behavior occurred both subsequent and antecedent to solution statements more frequently in families with higher frequencies of solution statements: Agreements and contingency statements. Results are discussed in terms of an operant theory of problem solving in which agreements may serve as reinforcers for solutions and contingency statements may serve as discriminative stimuli.

Family-based approaches to reducing adolescent substance use: theories, techniques and findings.

There has been much discussion over the last two decades concerning the theoretical and philosophical, as well as practical merits of the two perspectives discussed in this chapter. Both theories recently have developed knowledge that benefits all researchers and practitioners and are in the process of developing more. Adherents to both orientations agree that the family and greater social context play important roles in determining adolescent substance use. They also concur that successful interventions to change adolescent behaviors include: (a) targeting behaviors appropriate for the adolescents' developmental status, (b) recognizing that adolescents are seldom self-referred, and (c) utilizing the fact that parents still potentially control much in their lives. Theoretical differences lie in choices of salient family and adolescent variables, units of measurement, levels of scientific analysis, and notions about cause and effect. Both theories, however, currently are generating knowledge that reduces adolescent substance use, and this bodes well for the future.

Predicting drug abuse: review and reformulation.

Current knowledge points to several psychosocial risk factors, each of which correlates with drug abuse but does not explain all of the variance. Predictive studies have shown that combinations of these risk factors predict drug abuse better than any single risk factor does, but no one combination reliably predicts better than any other. These findings suggest, as stress theory postulates, that number of risk factors predicts drug abuse better than any particular set of risk factors.

Reducing the incidence of adolescent problems through preventive intervention: one- and five-year follow-up.

The conceptual importance of preventive interventions rests upon their ability to produce effects across time, settings, and behaviors. The present studies investigate whether a school-based preventive intervention, for high-risk adolescents, which has shown short-term effects of reducing predisposing factors, will show long-term effects of reducing school and community delinquency problems and substance abuse. School records and interviews 1 year after the program and arrest records at 5 years all suggest that the intervention reduced delinquency problems. The evidence was less clear for substance abuse. It was concluded that a better method for detecting substance abuse is needed before that question can be answered. The paper also discusses processes that may have mediated the delinquency results and implications for future prevention research.

Research design in drug abuse prevention: review and recommendations.

This paper highlights the strengths and notes the deficits in recent drug abuse prevention research design. Then it recommends that future studies include: (1) a longer follow-up period than 2 years, (2) a population "at risk" for drug abuse, (3) a "natural setting," (4) random assignment to program and nonprogram groups, and (5) objective drug use interviews along with unotrusive measures of the correlates of drug abuse. The rationale behind each recommendation is discussed.