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This study investigated the effectiveness of a new counseling program integrating cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy to promote emotional regulation (ER) among undergraduate students with depression.

An interventional mixed method design was employed with the development of a qualitative method-based program using experimental and qualitative research. The sample consisted of 792 third-year undergraduate students at a public university in Bangkok. A total of 34 students with depression voluntarily enrolled and were divided into 2 groups. The 17 students in the experimental group received integrated counseling, while those in the control group received brochures. The effectiveness was evaluated using the self-assessment section on the ER scale and the Beck Depression Inventory form before and after counseling. When the program ended, qualitative research was conducted using in-depth interviews. In terms of quantitative research, the data were analyzed using one-way MANOVA and the qualitative research data used content analysis.

The mean scores for ER and depression in the experimental group before and after counseling were significantly different (p-value <0.05). Results were also significantly different from the control group (p-value <0.05). Students with depression showed improvements in ER in all six components after joining the program, including awareness, clarity, acceptance, impulse, goals and strategies.

Integrated counseling is an effective program that can increase ER and reduce depression among adolescents and can be an alternative program for depressive patients or other mood-regulating problems to promote ER.

Emotional competence supports preschoolers’ social relationships and school success. Parents’ emotions and reactions to preschoolers’ emotions can help them become emotionally competent, but scant research corroborates this role for preschool teachers. Expected outcomes included: teachers’ emotion socialization behaviors functioning most often like parents’ in contributing to emotional competence, with potential moderation by socioeconomic risk. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

Participants included 80 teachers and 312 preschoolers experiencing either little economic difficulty or socioeconomic risk. Children’s emotionally negative/dysregulated, emotionally regulated/productive and emotionally positive/prosocial behaviors were observed, and their emotion knowledge was assessed in Fall and Spring. Teachers’ emotions and supportive, nonsupportive and positively emotionally responsive reactions to children’s emotions were observed during Winter. Hierarchical linear models used teacher emotions or teacher reactions, risk and their interactions as predictors, controlling for child age, gender and premeasures.

Some results resembled those parents’: positive emotional environments supported children’s emotion knowledge; lack of nonsupportive reactions facilitated positivity/prosociality. Others were unique to preschool classroom environments (e.g. teachers’ anger contributed to children’s emotion regulation/productive involvement; nonsupportiveness predicted less emotional negativity/dysregulation). Finally, several were specific to children experiencing socioeconomic risk: supportive and nonsupportive reactions, as well as tender emotions, had unique, but culturally/contextually explainable, meanings in their classrooms.

Applications to teacher professional development, and both limitations and suggestions for future research are considered.

This study is among the first to examine how teachers contribute to the development of preschoolers’ emotional competence, a crucial set of skills for life success.

This study aims to investigate the favourable conditions that influence transgenerational value transmission (TVT), value acceptance and value similarity between generations in indigenous African business-owning families.

This study adopts a multiple case study design and draws on semi-structured face-to-face interviews to collect data from participants in seven indigenous Black business-owning families located in South Africa. The software ATLAS.ti was utilised to manage the data and reflexive thematic analysis was undertaken.

The analysis reveal four themes describing how transmission factors facilitate favourable conditions for successful TVT in IBSA business-owning families, namely, authoritarian parenting, a loving and connected family relational climate, the continuous reinforcement of autonomy during childhood development and family authenticity in the face of societies dominant values climate. Furthermore, value similarity is perceived to exist among the different family generations in the business-owning families.

This study is among the first to adopt the value acquisition model to empirically examine successful TVT and examine the extent of value similarity or dissimilarity, using the business-owning family as the unit of analysis. Novel contributions to family business literature and practices are proposing a model for TVT in an African context and studying relationships from a business-owning family perspective. The model for TVT could be used to socialise the NextGen members into value sets and behaviours that help business-owning families preserve their entrepreneurial legacy and family business longevity.

Using longitudinal data, this study aims to provide a greater understanding as to how parenting factors, including the employment of various disciplinary techniques, during a young person's early adolescence may contribute to excessive Internet use (EIU) in later adolescence.

Employing “Problem Behaviour” theory (PBT) as a guiding framework, this study uses data from the Growing Up in Ireland ’98 Cohort to investigate the effect of proximal and distal parental influences, measured when children were 13 years old, on symptoms of EIU in young adults at 17 or 18 years. Multiple regression models control for other child and family factors, and separate models for males and females examine sex differentials.

Estimation did not find a statistically significant association between internet-specific mediation practices in early adolescence and EIU in later adolescence. However, regularly playing games or sports together is a protective factor. Parent-adolescent conflict and spending time home alone are estimated as risk factors. How parents deal with misbehaviour is a strong predictor of EIU, with the direction of association dependent upon the type and frequency of discipline employed.

The findings are of practical significance in informing parents of modifiable aspects of their behaviour that can lead to EIU.

The study applies a longitudinal modelling framework and considers the effect on EIU of various parental disciplinary techniques, representing a novel contribution.

Genetic risk for depressive disorders is poorly understood despite consistent suggestions of a high heritable component. Most genetic studies have focused on risk associated with single variants, a strategy which has so far only yielded small (often non-replicable) risks for depressive disorders. In this paper we argue that more substantial risks are likely to emerge from genetic variants acting in synergy within and across larger neurobiological systems (polygenic risk factors). We show how knowledge of major integrated neurobiological systems provides a robust basis for defining and testing theoretically defensible polygenic risk factors. We do this by describing the architecture of the overall stress response. Maladaptation via impaired stress responsiveness is central to the aetiology of depression and anxiety and provides a framework for a systems biology approach to candidate gene selection. We propose principles for identifying genes and gene networks within the neurosystems involved in the stress response and for defining polygenic risk factors based on the neurobiology of stress-related behaviour. We conclude that knowledge of the neurobiology of the stress response system is likely to play a central role in future efforts to improve genetic prediction of depression and related disorders.

The assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in childhood has two essential aspects: the identification of the risk (under 30 months of age) and the definition of a diagnosis that takes into account its core areas as well as further non-specific aspects. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach that considers the combination of clinical evaluation with the use of tools that analyse the various levels of the child’s functioning as fundamental.

The comprehensive assessment at the Institute of Ortofonologia in Rome provides the ADOS-2 and the Leiter-R for the evaluation of the symptomatology, the severity level, the non-verbal cognitive functioning and the fluid reasoning; the TCE and the UOI are used to identify, respectively, the child’s emotional skills and the ability to understand the intentions of others, as precursors of the theory of mind. Within this assessment, the Brief-P, the Short Sensory Profile and the RBS are also included for the evaluation of executive functions, sensory pattern and of restricted and repetitive behaviours, as observed by parents.

How to define a reliable development profile, which allows to plan a specific intervention calibrated on the potential of the child and on his development trajectory, is described. Two clinical cases are also presented.

The entire process is aimed both at a detailed assessment of the child’s functioning and at identifying a specific therapeutic project and predictive factors for achieving an optimal outcome.

How does the human brain absorb information and turn it into skills of its own in psychotherapy? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors will review the intricacies of processing channels in psychotherapy and propose the term transprocessing (as in transduction and processing combined) for the underlying mechanisms. Through transprocessing the brain processes multimodal memories and creates reparative solutions in the course of psychotherapy. Transprocessing is proposed as a stage-sequenced mechanism of deconstruction of engrained patterns of response. Through psychotherapy, emotional-cognitive reintegration and its consolidation is accomplished. This process is mediated by cellular and neural plasticity changes.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

This paper aims to empirically test the influence of brand characteristics on brand addiction, as well as the consumers’ behaviors caused by this construct.

The paper adopts a Web-based self-completion survey by achieving a total of 529 completed surveys. Then, structural equation modeling has been employed by using SPSS AMOS.

Results highlighted how the brand characteristics of self-expressiveness, innovativeness and authenticity have a positive influence on brand addiction; brand addiction leads consumers to feel emotions of irritability and to adopt obsessive and compulsive behaviors toward the brand.

Even if the choice of using a survey’s sample composed of students attending an Italian University ensures good internal validity of research (owing to the homogeneous character), the results are not generalizable (except for this population group).

The study identified two different spheres of brand addiction (one connected to the brand’s characteristics and the other to the consumers’ psychological-behavioral outcomes), along with possible strategies firms could adopt to strengthen the possibilities to transform their customers into addicted ones and to avoid/reduce the negative consequences deriving from brand addiction.

The paper provides a response to the call for more studies into the brand addiction analysis by empirically testing possible antecedents and outcomes, thus enriching the existing quantitative research focused on this concept.

An emerging evidence base, and increased awareness of the effects of trauma on the body, advocates a sensory-based approach to treatment with posttraumatic stress and complex trauma survivors. This paper aims to identify, analyse and summarise the empirical evidence for the sensory-based interventions, which occupational therapists are using in the treatment of adult and adolescent trauma survivors.

An integrative review of the literature was undertaken. Both empirical and conceptual papers were included. An inductive approach and constant comparative method were used to understand and synthesise the research.

The literature search yielded 18 papers describing the types of sensory-based interventions used, sensory processing (SP) patterns and the context and evidence for sensory-based occupational therapy practice with trauma survivors. Nine of the studies were empirical and nine were conceptual and review papers. Themes identified included: atypical SP patterns; type of sensory-based intervention used with trauma survivors; and transdisciplinary treatment programmes can reduce the symptoms of trauma.

Sensory-based interventions with adult and adolescent trauma survivors are emerging as promising areas of practice and research in the literature. Although empirical data is limited, the sensory needs of the body in processing trauma experiences is becoming more recognised and are supported by the atypical SP patterns identified in survivors. A sensory-based, transdisciplinary approach to treatment has the potential to be effective in treating the trauma survivor.

With a skill base in sensory integration and occupational analysis, occupational therapists have much to offer the field of trauma studies. This review begins to address the gap in the literature, recommending more rigorous controlled outcome research with larger sample sizes, person-centred studies focussing on the trauma survivor’s perspective and continuing professional development and mentorship for occupational therapists working with this population.