The Role of Personal Resilience and Interpersonal Support in Building Fulfilling and Prosocial Lives: Examining the Good Lives Model among Young Women Four Years after Youth Detention.

Despite growing interest in strength-based rehabilitation frameworks, relevant internal/external resources that are likely to facilitate the rehabilitation of detained female adolescents (DFA) have been understudied. This study aims to fill this gap by studying the role of young women's personal resilience and interpersonal support in building fulfilling and prosocial lives 4 years after youth detention, thereby examining the strength-based good lives model (GLM). Forty-nine former DFA (Mage = 20.75) completed questionnaires about resilience, support, Quality of Life (QoL), and offending. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that young women with more resilience displayed higher QoL and less offending, while more support was associated with higher QoL only. The relationship between resilience and QoL/offending did not depend upon the level of support. Overall, our results support the applicability of the GLM to former DFA, showing evidence for the importance of both internal and external resources in building fulfilling and prosocial lives.

A Qualitative Study on Young Women's Lives Prior to and Four Years after Youth Detention: Examining the Good Lives Model's Aetiological Assumptions.

Detained female adolescents constitute a vulnerable, challenging, and understudied minority. Interventions for DFA are still dominated by risk management approaches with less focus on strength-based approaches such as the Good Lives Model (GLM). This study explored the functionality of DFA's behaviour prior to and four years after release from detention, using the GLM as the guiding theoretical framework. A theory-driven thematic analysis was conducted of 30 in-depth interviews with former DFA (Mage = 20.80), exploring the fulfilment of their basic human needs (e.g., relatedness, independence) before and after detention. Before detention, the young women experienced multiple problems trying to fulfil multiple human needs, often contributing to poor balance in their lives and their antisocial behaviour. Although external and internal obstacles to fulfilling human needs were still present at follow-up, important improvements were noted, e.g., in the scope of their human needs and the resources available to fulfil their needs. The findings provide additional insights into the issues experienced by young women in detention and indicate there are opportunities to assist these young women, through the development of appropriate resources and capacities which provide them with appropriate means for fulfilling their needs and moving towards a personally meaningful and prosocial life.

Strengths and weaknesses of the psychology of criminal conduct: Implications for the conceptualisation, assessment and treatment of antisocial personality pattern.

The Psychology of Criminal Conduct and its associated components (e.g. the Risk Need Responsivity model, the Central Eight risk factors) has been hugely influential in the criminal justice sector. However, like any theory it has relative strengths and weakness, one weakness being that assumptions have been made about the causal nature and conceptual coherence of its foundational constructs, dynamic risk factors. The numerous issues with the conceptualisation of dynamic risk factors have implications for the widespread practice of using them as explanations of offending and to inform intervention planning. Recently some attention has been given to exploring the conceptualisation and definitions, scope and use of dynamic risk factors. Some key advancements in this area are considered and we illustrate how the weaknesses encountered by dynamic risk factors may impact our understanding and application of these concepts, using the example of Antisocial Personality Pattern.

Reorienting Locus of Control in Individuals Who Have Offended Through Strengths-Based Interventions: Personal Agency and the Good Lives Model.

Having an external locus of control has been associated with a range of well-supported risk correlates of offending behavior. Further, individuals with an internal locus of control orientation are suggested to be more open to engaging in treatment and are also considered more likely to have successful treatment outcomes. In forensic settings, where individuals are subject to external controls and have little personal autonomy, it is important to consider what treatment approaches might be most successful in reorienting individuals' locus of control. The Good Lives Model (GLM) proposes a strengths-based approach to the rehabilitation of individuals who have offended. Within the GLM, an external locus of control is suggested to be associated with a deficit in the primary good of agency. In this article, we will provide a brief overview of the literature on locus of control and its hypothesized role in offending behavior. We will discuss how an external locus of control orientation is related to personal agency and how strengths-based models, such as the GLM, may assist with reorienting locus of control in individuals who have offended through promoting personal agency.

Maternal Elaborative Language in Shared Emotion Talk with ODD Children: Relationship to Child Emotion Competencies.

While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability. The association for child emotion regulation was moderated by child's diagnostic status with a notable relationship for ODD mother-child dyads but not for the other group. The implications of the findings for the conceptualisation of mother-child talk and its relationship to the development of emotion competencies in children with disruptive behavioural problems are discussed.

Emotional Abilities in Children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): Impairments in Perspective-Taking and Understanding Mixed Emotions are Associated with High Callous-Unemotional Traits.

Most studies of emotion abilities in disruptive children focus on emotion expression recognition. This study compared 74 children aged 4-8 years with ODD to 45 comparison children (33 healthy; 12 with an anxiety disorder) on behaviourally assessed measures of emotion perception, emotion perspective-taking, knowledge of emotions causes and understanding ambivalent emotions and on parent-reported cognitive and affective empathy. Adjusting for child's sex, age and expressive language ODD children showed a paucity in attributing causes to emotions but no other deficits relative to the comparison groups. ODD boys with high levels of callous-unemotional traits (CU) (n = 22) showed deficits relative to low CU ODD boys (n = 25) in emotion perspective-taking and in understanding ambivalent emotions. Low CU ODD boys did not differ from the healthy typically developing boys (n = 12). Impairments in emotion perceptive-taking and understanding mixed emotions in ODD boys are associated with the presence of a high level of CU.

The Role of Language Skill in Child Psychopathology: Implications for Intervention in the Early Years.

In this narrative review, we suggest that children's language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children's self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children's early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill mediates the relation between early language skill and children's emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent-child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children's vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent-child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years.

Sexually abusive youth: a review of recidivism studies and methodological issues for future research.

This paper is a critical review of the recidivism studies on sexually abusive youth. Recidivism studies looking at sexually abusive youth have only appeared in the literature in the last 10 to 15 years and the small number of published studies, along with difficulties in defining recidivism, have affected the quality of outcome data. The most consistent criteria for recidivism applied in the literature uses official records to determine subsequent arrests and/or convictions for sexual and/or non-sexual offences. However, official records are conservative and so will underestimate recidivism rates. Recidivism rates for sexually abusive youth who have received treatment for sexual re-offending are approximately 10%, though rates vary greatly (0% to 42%), while recidivism rates for non-sexual offending are higher (ranging between 8% and 52%). Research indicates that comparison groups of untreated sexually abusive youth have higher rates of sexual and non-sexual re-offending than those who have received treatment. Specific recommendations are made for strengthening research design in future studies. These include using multiple sources to determine recidivism (e.g. official records, self-report, family report and standardised psychological tools), having comparison groups of treatment dropouts and untreated sexually abusive youth and including long-term, longitudinal follow-up of youth.