This study explored the relationships between individuals' ability to tolerate emotional distress to their tendency to worry excessively, the amount of imagery they experience during worrying, and the concreteness of their worrisome thought. A group of 119 university students completed a thought-listing task recording their most severe current worry, estimated the amount of imagery and verbal thought during this worry episode, and completed questionnaires assessing their worry proneness, negative effect, and ability to tolerate emotional distress. The concreteness of thought-listed worry episodes was rated by independent judges. Consistent with expectations, lower distress tolerance was associated with more worrying, even when levels of negative affect were statistically controlled for. Excessive worriers also reported lower levels of imagery, but imagery and distress tolerance were unrelated. The findings concerning concreteness were in the opposite direction to those expected: more excessive worrying and lower distress tolerance were associated with more concreteness of worrisome thought. The results are consistent with avoidance theory, but future research is needed to investigate the mechanisms by which low distress tolerance may contribute to excessive worrying.

The study investigated whether obese children are more impulsive than lean children, taking into account the multidimensionality of the construct. Responses of 41 overweight children were compared to those of 40 lean children. The Stop Task, Circle Drawing Task and Opposite Worlds Task were administered to measure executive inhibitory control, and the Maudsley Index of Childhood Delay Aversion and the Door Opening Task were administered to measure motivational inhibitory control. On the Stop Task, the overweight children showed less inhibitory control. On the Opposite Worlds task, we found no significant difference, whereas on the Circle Drawing Task an unexpected group difference was found. Although on the Door Opening Task the overweight children showed greater reward sensitivity, they were equally motivated to wait on the Maudsley Index of Childhood Delay. We conclude that the findings were different depending on the measure used, but that they suggest that overweight children can be characterised by a decrease in executive and motivational inhibitory control.

This study examined the influence of maternal anxiety on the treatment outcome of anxious children. Forty-eight clinically anxious children (aged 6–14 years) were classified into two groups based on the presence of an anxiety disorder diagnosis in their mother. Diagnostic data at posttreatment showed that children with anxious mothers responded significantly less favourably to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) than did children with nonanxious mothers (28% vs. 58% improved, respectively). At 12-month follow-up, 68% of children with anxious mothers improved, compared to 79% of children with nonanxious mothers. This difference was not significant. Findings were not consistent across outcome measures. This study also investigated the changes in maternal anxiety across child treatment. Prior to treatment, diagnostic data showed that 60% of mothers met criteria for an anxiety disorder. At posttreatment, 21% of these mothers were free of their primary diagnosis. There was also a significant reduction in self-reported maternal anxiety across treatment that was maintained at follow-up. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.

There were two aims of the research with 190 Australian clinical psychologists: (1) to investigate the construct validity of the Therapist Belief Scale (TBS), and (2) to examine the relative contribution of demographics, workplace variables, and individual factors to burnout. Construct validity was examined using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and associations between the variables. Multivariate regressions were used to examine the relative contributions to burnout. The TBS showed three factors related to distress, inflexibility, and control, all of which were significantly associated with lower levels of personal accomplishment. Multivariate analyses showed emotional exhaustion to be associated being a woman, working for the government, having less personal resources, and endorsing more therapist beliefs related to control. Higher levels of personal accomplishment were significantly associated with a lower annual income, not having a mixed caseload, having more personal resources, and endorsing lower levels of therapist beliefs related to inflexibility and control.

The ACT (Acute Cognitive Therapy) Program was implemented as a patient follow-up initiative to respond to people presenting to emergency departments with suicidal behaviour or ideation, in a psychosocial crisis. Over 12 months 188 patients were referred to the program of which 160 attended at least one appointment and 109 completed the program. Pre- and postmeasures indicated that significant improvement occurred in those who completed the program, that improvements were maintained at 6 months and representation rates were reduced. Immediate short-term directed treatment appears beneficial in the short and medium term, and the rapidity and location of follow-up appears to promote compliance.

The Promoting Adult Resilience (PAR) program is a strengths-based resilience building program that integrates Interpersonal and CBT perspectives. The second, successful pilot of the PAR program in the human-service departments of a local government organisation used a 7-week format. At posttest, PAR participants reported greater self-efficacy, more family satisfaction, greater work–life fit and balance and less negative family–work spillover than the comparison group. At the 6-month follow up, these gains were maintained, although to a lesser degree, with work–life balance being considerably strengthened, and negative spillover in both directions reduced. Participants also reported greater optimism, greater work satisfaction, less stress and promisingly for human service workers, exhaustion was reduced and work vigour was increased. This is important for human service professions as exhaustion, a component of burnout, is associated with higher employee turnover and poorer employee outcomes. Participants reported that they could easily incorporate the new skills into their lives and at follow up, they continued to use the skills to manage the demands of their work and family lives.

Research carried out in several Anglo-Saxon countries shows that many undergraduates identify oral sex and anal sex as examples of abstinent behaviour, while many others consider kissing and masturbation as examples of having sex. The objective of this research was to investigate whether a sample of Spanish students gave similar replies. Seven hundred and fifty undergraduates (92% aged under 26, 67.6% women) produced examples or definitions of the term ‘abstinence’. Spanish students made similar errors to those observed in the Anglo-Saxon samples, in that behaviours that were abstinent from a preventive point of view (masturbating and sex without penetration) were not considered as such, while a number of students reported oral sex as abstinent behaviour. The results suggest that the information on risky and preventive sexual behaviour should cease to use ambiguous or euphemistic expressions and use vocabulary that is clear and comprehensible to everyone.

The relative power of Positive and Negative Punishment as predictors of anxiety and depression was investigated within the gender-specific population of Prostate Cancer patients. As well as being a more powerful predictor of total test scores, Positive Punishment was also a stronger predictor of the presence of clinical levels of anxiety and depression. Examination of the particular Positive Punishment events that were significantly associated with clinical anxiety and depression showed considerable overlap, supporting the concept of a combined anxiety-depression disorder. Suggestions for behavioural interventions with this patient group are made.

Four anxiety disordered 8- to 11-year-old children and their parents participated in a shortened version of an efficacious cognitive–behavioural program for anxiety in children, designed to reflect therapy conditions found in usual clinical practice. A modified multiple-baseline design was used that combined clinic setting pragmatics with a necessary level of methodological protection. For ongoing evaluation, weekly measures of the child's trait anxiety and coping ability were obtained from the child and parents. In addition, a battery of measures was used to evaluate outcomes following treatment and at two follow-up intervals. Emphasising increased parent involvement and earlier exposure sessions, the program was found to lead to marked changes in child functioning. In particular, all children showed improvement on self-report, parent report, and independent clinician's ratings over the course of treatment. Moreover, scores on relevant indices were all within a nondeviant range following intervention, and all four children no longer qualified for an anxiety diagnosis at posttreatment and at 3- and 12-month followup. Findings are discussed in terms of implementation and evaluation in practice settings (e.g., critical components of treatment, use of pragmatic single case designs). Suggestions for future research include testing the effectiveness of this brief program on a large and diverse sample of children. Additional research is also required to find out to what extent increased parent involvement and earlier exposure sessions enhance the impact of treatment in the larger context of addressing features of the research-practice gap. Overall, findings provide preliminary support for the effectiveness of a brief cognitive–behavioural program for treating anxiety disorders in children, along with an evaluation strategy, compatible with some of the needs of service delivery settings.

Domestic violence is a pervasive social problem that has devastating emotional, physical, psychological, and financial costs for individuals, families, and communities. Despite the widespread use of current intervention programmes, recent reviews have demonstrated that these have only a small impact on the reduction of recidivism. In this article, we briefly summarise the features identified in the literature that distinguish domestically violent men from those who do not engage in such behaviours. We then explore the most common interventions used to treat domestic violence offenders and discuss the limitations of these interventions, before outlining the assumptions of the Good Lives Model (GLM), a strength-based approach to the treatment of offenders. We discuss the advantages of using the GLM compared to existing approaches and finally, we consider future directions for the use of the GLM in domestic violence interventions.

The mental health correlates of male aggression or violence against an intimate partner (IPV) are examined using exploratory cluster analysis for 81 men who self-reported risk factors for IPV perpetration on a computer-based health risk assessment. Men disclosing IPV perpetration could be meaningfully subdivided into two different clusters: a high pathology/high violence cluster, and lower pathology/low violence cluster. These groups appear to perpetrate intimate partner violence in differing psychoemotional contexts and could be robustly identified using multiple distinct analytic methods. If men who self-disclose IPV in a health care setting can be meaningfully subdivided based on mental health symptoms and level of violence, it lends support for potential new targeted approaches to preventing partner violence perpetration by both women and men.

Reviews have demonstrated large effect sizes when using computerised cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) protocols for treating anxiety, depression and health related concerns. However, the amount of therapist contact per user seems to be the most significant prognostic indicator. Thus, in some ways current online interventions can be viewed primarily as an extension of one-on-one therapy. The present article provides guidelines for targeting this limitation of online psychological interventions. The goal is to mimic the therapeutic relationship using a computer, without having any therapist involved. Consequently, thousands of users would be able to receive treatment simultaneously, reaching a wider audience, which was the initial goal of the online model. The development of a treatment program using file audit data is suggested as an alternative to having an individual therapist for each user. This is done by allowing the ‘computer psychologist’ to tailor individualised treatments for each user based on their psychological profile. The user is provided with individualised corrective feedback based on a set of prewritten responses to common faulty thoughts. A new paradigm is proposed for online treatment delivery.

This study presents the results of preliminary findings on the continuing effect of cognitive-behavioural treatment groups (CBT) for Chinese people in Hong Kong with depression at 6-month follow-up. Data from 18 of the 48 CBT group participants was analysed using repeated-measures ANOVAs. The same questionnaire was administered to the participants at the pretest, posttest, and 6-month follow-up test. The findings reveal that participants continued to maintain significantly fewer symptoms of depression and dysfunctional rules, and significantly more adaptive coping skills and positive emotions when their follow-up test scores were compared to their pretest and posttest scores. Effect size statistics showed mostly medium differences in all of the above outcome measures between the pretest and posttest, and between the pretest and follow-up test (Cohen's d = 0.51–.77). A statistical approach to clinical significance revealed that in the follow-up test, over 60% of the participants could be considered clinically recovered or clinically remitted. Lastly, the results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses provided some evidence of a linkage between cognition and depression among the participants at posttest and follow-up. This study appears to support the continuing effect of CBT groups for Chinese people in Hong Kong with depression at a 6-month follow-up.

This paper introduces a novel approach to internet treatment for social anxiety. The goal of this treatment was to address key limitations of current standalone treatments (Helgadottir, Menzies, Onslow, Packman, & O'Brian, 2009). The ‘computer psychologist’ designed for this study used fully automated, prewritten individualised sample answers in order to simulate a human–human interaction through a human–computer interface. Two males who sought treatment for stuttering and met the diagnosis for social phobia according to the DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria were selected for this study. After receiving the treatment, both users no longer met criteria for social phobia. Also, significant improvements were observed on other psychometric tests, including measures of unhelpful cognitions, behavioural avoidance, quality of life, and low mood. The quality of the interaction appeared to be similar to face-to-face therapy, indicating that the ‘computer psychologist’ established an effective therapeutic relationship, and the automated techniques used were sufficiently engaging to prompt users to log on regularly and complete the treatment program.

This article reports four case studies illustrating the implementation of the Choose Health Program, a cognitive behavioural lifestyle intervention for overweight and obese adolescents. Participants were an overweight (12 years) and obese (15 years) female, and an overweight (14 years) and obese (12 years) male. The program was delivered by provisional psychologists with program specific training and supervision. All participants demonstrated improvements in body composition, and maintained or improved dietary quality and psychosocial wellbeing. The program had variable effects on physical activity and minimal effect on cardiovascular fitness for three of the four participants. While parents and adolescents required considerable assistance to develop and monitor long term program goals, these goals were a useful clinical tool to support the adolescent and parent to recognise the improvements they had made. Identification and monitoring of specific, measurable, and realistic behaviour change strategies was particularly important in assisting adolescents and their parents to translate session information into improved health behaviours. Results indicate that an adolescent overweight and obesity treatment program that promotes adolescent responsibility and autonomy, and emphasises the importance of parent support and family change is both effective and highly acceptable to both adolescents and parents.

The limited communicative abilities of young children with autism and developmental disabilities may be enhanced by augmentative communication systems such as the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). Both children and adults can learn to use PECS, but research is inconsistent in establishing the degree to which PECS training transfers reliably from the training setting to other settings, for example, regular classrooms, and home. Three 5–6 year-old children, diagnosed as autistic and/or developmentally disabled, were given 1:1 PECS training at school, structured to enhance generalisation and transfer. Concurrent observations were made in their regular classroom and at home to probe the extent of generalisation. All three acquired the ability to request a preferred object or activity by exchanging a picture symbol with a communicative partner. In tests of transfer and generalisation, a multiple-baseline across subjects design showed no use of PECS symbols either in the classroom or at home prior to training, with spontaneous initiations of picture exchange (transfer) occurring to a slight to moderate degree in the classroom and to a slight degree at home. Even with PECS training structured to enhance transfer, functionally significant degrees of generalisation of training may be difficult to achieve, and cannot be assumed to occur.

The 13-item Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Specific Phobias (SEQ-SP) was developed as a measure of perceived ability to cope with phobic symptoms when approaching feared stimuli. This study examined the psychometric properties of the SEQ-SP in a sample of 43 Australian children and adolescents aged 7 through to 17 years. Participants met the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for a specific phobia. Exploratory factor analysis yielded two reliable subscales labelled Cognitive/Physiological Efficacy and Behavioural Efficacy. A confirmatory cluster analysis revealed the possibility of three ad hoc clusters comprising of cognitive, physiological and behavioural classifications. Results furthermore provided preliminary evidence for the reliability and validity of the SEQ-SP. Psychometric evaluation revealed excellent internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Additionally, results indicated that higher SEQ-SP scores were significantly correlated with lower scores on the Child Anxiety Sensitivity Index and higher scores on the Behavioural Avoidance Test, displaying evidence of moderate to excellent construct validity. This new self-report measure has a potentially useful role in clinical work and research with children and adolescents presenting with a specific phobia. Subsequent research examining the clinical utility of the SEQ-SP to predict treatment outcome is discussed.

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a widely used intervention strategy designed to teach communication skills to children with developmental delays, including autism. The Picture Exchange Communication System incorporates the teaching of mand initiations that are thought to be pivotal response behaviours, and have been demonstrated to lead to generalised improvements in other nontargeted behaviours. The aim of the present study was to assess the acquisition of PECS with a 3-year-old boy with autism using the established PECS training program, and to evaluate concomitant changes in spoken language, social–communicative behaviours, and functional play. Results indicated that the participant rapidly acquired the criterion behaviours for Phases 1 to 3 of the PECS program. Although PECS exchanges were rarely observed in the generalisation settings, clear increases were evident in verbal mands and other initiations in both home and kindergarten generalisation settings. Increases in spoken vocabulary and in the length of comprehensible spoken utterances in free-play were observed as were gains in time spent in developmentally appropriate play. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.

This article introduces a new intervention model designed to address phobic avoidances in children with Asperger syndrome, incorporating principles and techniques from cognitive and behaviour therapy into the art form of drama. This paper presents a single case study that outlines the application of the model in the treatment of a long-term fear of hand-driers in an 11-year-old boy, diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, for whom all other forms of therapy including variants of systematic desensitisation and traditional cognitive behaviour therapy had been found to be ineffective. The results of this study offer preliminary descriptive evidence of the efficacy of the model and durability of outcomes.

A 64-year-old male who met criteria for social and generalised anxiety was treated using a brief behavioural activation (BA) approach. The intervention was delivered in twelve weekly 60-minute individual sessions. The effects of the intervention were assessed using a simple A-B-C phase change with repeated measurement design. Change in reported anxiety was recorded across phases. Decreased scores in self-reported anxiety measures were obtained and significant clinical improvement was maintained during a 4-month no treatment maintenance phase. This preliminary investigation suggests BA could be an efficient and effective treatment for anxiety and that replications are warranted.