March 2011

Events

• Resilience - Why Bother?

  To be held April 6 – 7, 2011 in Brighton, UK, this conference will examine what resilience research is telling us and consider ways of working in light of these findings. It will also ask how does resilience helps foster healthy responses in times of trouble.

• Resilience: new intervention perspectives on rehabilitation – Last chance to register

  This event will be held April 27- 28 2011 in Montreal, Quebec. The objectives are: to understand the practical significance of the concept of resilience applied to rehabilitation or to other areas; develop knowledge on approaches, methods and techniques to integrate the concept of resilience in rehabilitation and to other areas of intervention; consider organizational or management practices that could support the process of resilience for the user of health services or his family; develop links on provincial, national and international levels among researchers, professionals and users in order to develop research projects and interventions that include resilience.

• Promoting Resilience in Youth and Families: Mental Health and Education Interventions

  This event will be held April 29, 2011 at McGill University in Montreal. It will bring together three internationally renowned researchers and clinicians who have extensive expertise in working with children, families and schools in promoting the development of resilience.

• Soutenir le développement du pouvoir d’agir des parents en contexte de protection de la jeunesse : enjeux, pratiques, conséquences et réflexivité (2nd on the page)

  Every year, the Groupe de recherche et d’action sur la victimisation des enfants (GRAVE) and the Centre jeunesse Montréal Institut universitaire (CJM-IU) team up to offer members of the scientific community and stakeholders three conferences on the topic of youth violence. This conference will pay particular attention to youth protection and will feature the following guests: Louise Lemay, Associate Professor, Département de service social, University of Sherbrooke, Bruno Bourassa, Professor, Département des fondements et pratiques en éducation, Laval University; Renée Giguère, Consultant and Trainer. It will be held April 29, 2011 in Montreal.

News

• Regrets? Study examines how people can cope

  Most people will have their share of regrets over their lifetime. Indeed, anyone who seeks to overcome disappointments should compare themselves to others who are worse off – rather than looking up to folks in more enviable positions – according to a new study from Concordia University. Published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, these findings have implications for both young and old.

• ’Resilience Gene’ May Save Kids in Troubled Families

  Children who carry a variant of a so-called "resilience gene" get along much better with their troubled parents — those who have substance abuse, mental health or criminal problems — than those without the gene, a new study suggests. Assessing 226 children aged 9 to 17, researchers at Duke University Medical Center said the findings could explain genetically why some children in problematic families manage to maintain enjoyable relationships with their parents while others are blighted by the experience.

• Violent Video Games May Not Desensitize Kids: Study

  A long-standing concern among parents and researchers has been that young people who are exposed to violent video games may become desensitized to violent acts and images, but a new study suggests that may not be the case. Canadian researchers comparing gamers to non-gamers found that in the long run, gamers were just as likely to recall negative images in memory tests and to report the same levels of emotion in reaction to the pictures as the non-gamers. The findings were published in the January issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

• Spanking Makes Kids More Aggressive: The Research is Clear

  Catherine Taylor at Tulane University and her colleagues reviewed data from a 20-city study that took place between 1998 and 2005. Data from almost 2500 children shows that 3-year-olds who are spanked twice a month are one and half times more likely to be aggressive at age five than children who are not spanked. What’s particularly interesting is that Taylor and her group were able to rule out the confounding effect of factors like the mother’s own history of maltreatment, intimate partner violence in the home, or the mother’s substance use, depression and stress. They even ruled out whether the parents considered aborting the child before birth. Though any one of these factors might create a home environment that makes a child more likely to be aggressive, none of these factors explained the difference between the children who were spanked and those who were not.

• Recovering from the Victim Identity

  There is generally a deep sorrow within the person who identifies as Victim. Often that sorrow is related to real traumas, real heartbreak that occured in childhood, real tragedies. Sometimes the person who unconsciously identifies as Victim is ill or physically challenged in some way. Sometimes this person has literally been victimized in some way. But the Victim identity is not based on those heartbreaks, traumas, or challenges—though the Victim may successfully convince himself and others that they are. Rather, the Victim identity is based on an identification with victim-ness. This identification unconsciously insists that the person so identified can be nothing else but victim. Life-all of life-becomes defined by the thoughts and emotions of a pervasive as-if victim-ness, even when the Victim is not being victimized.

• ’Talk Therapy’ Can Alter Brain Activity, Research Shows

  Psychotherapy triggers changes in the brains of people with social anxiety disorder, finds a new study. Medication and psychotherapy are used to treat people with social anxiety, a common disorder in which people experience overwhelming fear of interacting with others and of being harshly judged. But there’s been far less research on the neurological effects of psychotherapy (talk therapy) than on medication-induced brain changes. The new Canadian study included 25 adults with social anxiety disorder who underwent 12 weekly sessions of group cognitive behavior therapy, which is meant to help patients identify and challenge their unhealthy thinking patterns.

Publications

• Sense of Belonging in School as a Protective Factor Against Drug Abuse Among Native American Urban Adolescents

  This article presents the results of a study conducted with 243 Native American students who were part of a multi-ethnic sample of adolescents attending middle school in a large urban center in the Southwest region of the United States. Native adolescents who felt a stronger sense of belonging in their school were found to report a lower lifetime use of alcohol and cigarettes, lower cigarette and marijuana use in the previous month, lower frequency of current use of these substances, fewer substances ever used, and a later age of initiation into drug use than other Native students. Research implications are discussed in relationship to school environment, culturally-grounded prevention curricula, and school social work practice.

• Taking the temperature of local communities The Wellbeing and Resilience Measure (warm)

  This report sets out a new way to measure the wellbeing and resilience of people and communities. It starts from the assumption that the key to flourishing neighbourhoods is to boost local assets and social wealth, while also tackling vulnerabilities and disadvantage. It describes a tool – Wellbeing and Resilience Measure (WARM) – that has been designed to support local agencies and communities to better understand, plan and act.

• Building Community Resilience to Disasters - A Way Forward to Enhance National Health Security

  This report provides a roadmap for federal, state, and local leaders who are developing plans to enhance community resilience for health security threats and describes options for building community resilience in key areas. Based on findings from a literature review and a series of community and regional focus groups, the authors provide a definition of community resilience in the context of national health security and a set of eight levers and five core components for building resilience. They then describe suggested activities that communities are pursuing and may want to strengthen for community resilience, and they identify challenges to implementation.
  Related document: Building Community Resilience to Disasters - A Roadmap to Guide Local Planning

• An interpersonally based intervention for low-income pregnant women with intimate partner violence: a pilot study

  This study assessed the initial feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of an intervention aimed at reducing depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a sample of low-income pregnant women with recent intimate partner violence (IPV). Fifty-four women were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention did not significantly reduce the likelihood of a major depressive episode, PTSD, or IPV during pregnancy or up to 3-month postpartum. However, the authors found moderate effects for the intervention in reducing symptoms of PTSD and depression during pregnancy and a large effect for PTSD symptoms from pregnancy up to 3 months postpartum.

• What Works for Promoting and Enhancing Positive Social Skills: Lessons from Experimental Evaluations of Programs and Interventions

  This Fact Sheet reviews 38 rigorously evaluated programs to identify what works to promote positive social skills among children and adolescents (such as getting along with others, expressing empathy to others, trying to resolve conflicts, and regulating emotions and behaviors). This literature review identifies practices that work, or do not work, to promote positive social skills. Most of these interventions include multiple components (for example, parent training, workshops and classroom-based curricula). For these interventions, it is not possible to determine the specific practices that are responsible for producing the impacts.

• Community Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

  The objective of this study was to evaluate community-provided trauma-focused cognitive behavior therapy (TF-CBT) compared with usual community treatment for children with intimate partner violence (IPV)–related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Results show that community TF-CBT effectively improves children’s IPV-related PTSD and anxiety.

• Patterns of adjustment among siblings exposed to intimate partner violence.

  This research explored and compared patterns of adjustment in siblings exposed to intimate partner violence. The quality of family relationships were investigated as potential mechanisms that accounted for heterogeneity in these patterns. Overall, asymptomatic siblings reported the most positive family relationships. Maternal warmth differed across clusters for both older and younger siblings, while maternal hostility varied across clusters for older but not younger siblings. The quality of sibling relationships also differed across clusters for older but not younger siblings. These findings underscore the importance of examining differential sibling experiences within violent families, and demonstrate the significance of family relationships as a mediating mechanism influencing heterogeneous child adjustment.

• Elderly People Coping With the Aftermath of War: Resilience Versus Vulnerability

  The present study compares coping of elderly people and two younger groups 1 year after a war. Coping was determined by stress symptoms and posttraumatic recovery and two levels of resiliency. The results indicated 1) The elderly group reported significantly higher levels of stress symptoms and lower levels of PTR; 2) Females in the three age groups reported higher levels of stress symptoms and lower levels of PTR and individual resilience than males; 3) Individual and public resilience negatively predicted stress symptoms and positively predicted posttraumatic recovery across three age groups; and 4) Public resilience has a differential effect on stress symptoms in each of the three age groups but not on PTR.

• Suicide, Schizophrenia, and Schizoid-Type psychosis: Role of Life Events and Childhood Factors

  The first objective of this study was to identify the provoking events of suicide in patients with schizophrenia or schizoid-type disorder, and to assess the humiliation component of these events. The second objective was to verify if quality of care during childhood is a vulnerability factor for suicide in patients with schizophrenia or schizoid-type psychosis. Thirty-three cases of suicide with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoid-type psychosis were compared with 34 living patients with a similar diagnosis.

• The coping process of patients with cancer

  The aim of this study was to investigate the implications of the alterations to lifestyle of cancer patients, from the onset of abnormal symptoms, followed by diagnosis and treatment, and then subsequent acceptance of the condition. Seven cancer patients from medical centers in Taiwan participated in the study. According to the results this study concluded that the coping processes used by some cancer sufferers enables them to draw upon various strengths and strategies to develop particular attitudes and skills to assist them to live with cancer. Overall, the findings tend to support the developmental interpretation, although the contextual interpretation also applies.

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