School-age children's perceptions of coping with distress: strategies for emotion regulation and the moderation of adjustment.

An inventory was developed to assess children's perceptions of what they did to feel better in stressful situations, and to examine the role of these perceptions in moderating the relationship between stress and outcome. A total of 345 6-12 year old children from diverse backgrounds were interviewed. Children's perceptions of what they do to relieve distress could be organized into six factors including the use of social support, distraction/avoidance, and other categories of coping which show continuity with those identified for infants and toddlers. Several types of coping served as compensatory moderators of the relationship between stress and self-worth.

Family stress and functioning in children: the moderating effects of children's beliefs about their control over parental conflict.

While factors such as gender and SES have been studied as moderators of stress for children, their perceptions of control have received little attention. In the current study, children's domain-specific perceptions of their control during marital conflict were investigated as potential moderators of the impact of family stress on children's behavior problems, and perceptions of competence. Ninety-four children aged 6-12 years and mothers from families ranging in level of parental conflict from nondiscordant to discordant to physically violent were interviewed. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher levels of conflict control beliefs acted as compensatory moderators of stress, being associated with lower levels of problem behaviors across stress levels. However, higher conflict control beliefs acted as vulnerability moderators with regard to children's perceptions of competence.

Developmental changes in trait and situational denial under stress during childhood.

Decline in denial usage during childhood was examined by obtaining four measures of denial from 34, 6-, 8- and 10-year-old boys. Significant age declines were observed for two trait denial measures and one situational denial measure. Positive relationships among denial measures were observed only for the trait measures. It appears that knowledge of trait denial may not be very useful in predicting situational denial; and that future research should be directed toward more detailed examination of cognitive processes associated with defensive outcomes and toward changes in external factors, such as peer evaluation of defensive behaviors, which could impact on the production of defensive responses.

Awareness, use, and consequences of evaluation data in a community mental health center.

A major aspect of the effort of the Mental Health Systems Evaluation Project of the Northwest Denver Community Health Center's has involved studying the utilization of program evaluation data by community mental health center managers and clinicians. The intent of this effort was twofold: to assess the impact of program evaluation feedback in the community mental health center per se; and to investigate factors that influenced this impact. The impact of such input was assessed initially at the level of "subjective utility." Later attempts involved more extended or interactive forms of input and impact assessment. Basic findings to date suggest that program evaluation data are most likely to have impact when directed at the managers most closely involved with the service at issue, and when presented, preferably simply and personally, in ways that insure an understanding of the data and its implications by those receiving it.

Comparison of social judgments of creativity and intelligence.

Social judgment of creativity and intelligence was investigated by having subjects give trait ratings for stimulus profiles of actual art students based on abilities information alone, based on personality information alone, based on biographical information alone, and finally, based on the total set of all three types of cue information. Regression equations differed depending upon whether intelligence or creativity judgments were being predicted. For all types of information, there was a significant amount of variation unique to creativity judgments which could not be accounted for by intelligence judgments, and vice versa. However, the proposition of variation unique to each type of trait judgment was smallest when subjects had only abilities information available and was approximately four times larger when judgments were based on the total set of three types of cue information. Implications of this finding for the study of creativity are discussed.