This study compared the rate of behavioral inhibition among children of parents with panic disorder to the one exhibited by children whose parents have no identified psychiatric disorder. Two groups of 20 White children aged two, three or four years old were matched for age, sex, socioeconomic level and ordinal position. Group assignment depended on the parent's diagnosis. In the clinical sample, at least one parent was suffering from panic disorder with or without agoraphobia. Neither parent of the children in the comparison group had ever met the requirements for psychiatric disorder. The Psychiatric Diagnostic Interview-Revised was used for the parent's assessment. The assessment of behavioral inhibition was made from scoring obtained in two play situations. In the first one, involving physically mildly challenging stimuli, three variables were considered: proportion of time the child remained proximal to the parent, number of tasks initiated and imitated. The second experimental situation involved play with an unfamiliar child of the same age and sex. The scoring elements included: latencies to first comment, to touch toys and to approach the other child as well as proportion of time proximal to the parent, staring at the other child and vocalizing. No significant difference was found between the two groups. There was a trend for children whose mother had panic disorder to be more inhibited than children whose father was symptomatic and for girls to be more inhibited than boys. The parents of the most inhibited youngsters in the clinical sample had all been severely symptomatic during the child's lifetime. Rather than rejecting outright the hypothesis of an increased rate of behavioral inhibition among children of parents with panic disorder, the author suggests some modifications. How acutely symptomatic the parent was during the child's lifetime would be a modulating factor as well as the gender of the child and of the symptomatic parent. More specifically, daughters of symptomatic mothers may be more at risk for behavioral inhibition. These qualifications suggest pathways for environmental influence on the course of behavioral inhibition in families where one of the parents is affected by panic disorder.

This study explored whether there were enduring memory and attention deficits in a nonclinical group of undergraduate women who had experienced child sexual abuse (CSA). Thirty-five women who were severely (n=18) or moderately (n=17) sexually abused and eighteen control subjects volunteered for the study. Subjects were matched on race, age, and grade point average. Measures of implicit and explicit memory as well as two measures of attention were administered under both no-threat and threat conditions. The threat paradigm employed was the use of words judged by 7 independent clinicians as either "threatening" or "very threatening" to adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Measures of depression and dissociation were also administered. It was hypothesized that there would be no baseline memory and/or attention deficits in the CSA population but that the experience of either internally or externally generated CSA-related threat would have an intermittent negative effect on these cognitive functions effecting attentional and memory disruptions in ongoing tasks. It was further hypothesized that the severely abused subjects would experience more disruption in the threat condition than the moderately abused subjects. Depression and dissociation scores were analyzed to ascertain both their presence in the three groups and their relationship to performance on the memory and attention tests. Under the no-threat condition, the severely abused subjects showed significantly poorer implicit memory than the controls in a between-groups univariate analysis of variance. An analysis of covariance with depression and dissociation as covariates showed this deficit could be attributed to the severe group's significantly greater depression. Under the threat condition, between-groups ultivariate analyses of variance showed there were no significant findings of memory or attention deficits in the CSA subjects although within-group univariate analyses showed trends in the hypothesized direction for both implicit memory and attention. These findings suggest that while some women who were sexually abused as children have enduring implicit memory and attention deficits as sequelae, the experience of the abuse, itself, is not a sufficient predictor of these deficits.

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In this study, 153 dual-earner, working-class couples were interviewed on five occasions during the first transition to parenthood. New parents' depression and anxiety was examined during a span of 14 months to test hypotheses that mental health would deteriorate over time for new parents, but that having a sense of control would buffer some parents against negative mental health outcomes. It was speculated that the working-class sample may be at risk for poor mental health outcomes due to having less access to occupational, financial, social, and personal (e.g., perceived sense of control) resources. Findings challenged the notion that a sense of control is exclusively a stable psychological trait and revealed that control is comprised of two distinct components: an enduring component and a malleable component that changes with context. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to demonstrate that, on average, mothers' depression followed a curvilinear pattern, dropping across the transition to parenthood and then rising again. On average, fathers reported a curvilinear pattern of anxiety, increasing over time and beginning to drop over the course of one year. There was also significant variability around new parents' mental health, illustrating that some parents increased, while others decreased or maintained stable levels of psychological well-being over time. Having a higher sense of enduring control predicted lower levels of psychological distress for new parents, and increases in control over time predicted decreases in depression and anxiety. Results hold important implications for intervention with new parents. Increasing expectant parents' sense of control can help them manage the transition to parenthood with psychological health, and can generalize to their taking action in other arenas such as the workplace.

The purpose of this study was to investigate, through semi-structured interviews and focus groups, how self-identified creative, high school adolescents perceived their experiences with creativity and its influence on their lives in order to (1) increase the available information on adolescent creativity with the contribution of the adolescent viewpoint and (2) begin to assess what relationships might exist between the creative functioning of adolescents and their social-personal processes, especially the developmental task of identity formation. All of the data, results, and conclusions of this study were based on the adolescents perspective: What did they think and/or feel about the nature of their own creativity? Was creativity important to them? What influenced their creativity? How did significant others respond to their creativity? Did their experiences with creativity relate to their developing sense of self, and if so, how did they characterize that connection? Qualitative research techniques were used to investigate 195 self-reports and the responses of nine interviewed adolescents (4 females/5 males, ethnically diverse, selected from the self-reports) who answered questions about their creativity. Information came from three perspectives: (1) 195 written reflections on personal creativity, (2) nine adolescent viewpoints revealed to an adult in two semi-structured interviews, including information from a biographical questionnaire and creativity measurements, (3) and the same adolescent viewpoint revealed to peers in two focus group discussions. One substantial finding was that the theme of the self and creativity recurred across all data sources--self-reports, interviews, focus groups--and response categories. Another was the 100% response rate describing creativity as increasing the interviewed adolescents' enjoyment and connection to life, nature and themselves. Specifically, they cited motivation, self-esteem, increased productivity, handling difficult emotions (anger, frustration, loneliness, etc.), an alternative to drug use, as processes which were positively affected by their creativity. Such personal testimony holds clues for educational and intervention strategies that could influence at-risk adolescents suffering from hopelessness, drugs, and early pregnancies. If creativity is valuable to adolescents by virtue of its life enhancing effects, then what preventatives might programs design to support and encourage the creative self in at-risk individuals?