Social-emotional competence trajectories from a school-based child trauma symptom intervention in a disadvantaged community

Childhood exposure to traumatic experiences and subsequent psychological symptoms increase the risk for lifelong behavioral and mental health problems, including depression diagnoses, reduced adaptive coping strategies, substance abuse, and early death, with negative impacts on children's social development and academic achievement. Social-emotional competence (SEC) is a key component of resilience to trauma exposure, and early deficits predict increased problem behaviors include delinquency and substance use. SEC is a protective factor that moderates the relationship between risks associated with trauma and subsequent outcomes. The current study used a longitudinal experimental design (treatment vs. comparison) to examine outcomes from a trauma-informed initiative in a disadvantaged community with high trauma exposure rates for K-8th grade students (n = 245). The intervention focused on bolstering children's social-emotional skills and resilience while reducing trauma symptoms and improving academic performance through multimodal programming. Hierarchical Linear Modeling indicated significant improvements in SEC from the intervention group, in contrast to the comparison group (B = 3.42, t = 3.04, p < .01), with gender effects indicating females see the greatest benefit (B = 3.52, t = 4.27, p < .01). Results indicated the significance of addressing SEC for children in disadvantaged communities, particularly those indicating a trauma history and resulting symptomology, as well as boys, who indicated reduced treatment effects.     

Writing your first successful grant application to conduct communication research

Advice is offered to help scholars write successful communication grant applications, including practical issues such as learning about opportunities, finding the time to write, planning personnel, budgeting, negotiating internal resources, institutional review boards, and deliverables. Additional tips are offered on theoretically rich research with socially meaningful applied outcomes, counterintuitive mechanisms and outcomes, simplicity, detail orientation, demonstrating expertise in the content area, and demonstrating expertise with the population under investigation. Finally, we mention some important traits for getting through the review process-persistence and low ego-involvement.     

Maternal Separation Anxiety: Its Developmental Course and Relation to Maternal Mental Health

Maternal separation anxiety is a construct that describes a mother's experience of worry, sadness, or guilt during short-term separations from her child. This investigation examined potential differences in psychological correlates between mothers with high and low levels of anxiety when their children were 8 months, 3 1/2 years, and 6 years of age. High levels of maternal separation anxiety had different psychological correlates contingent upon the age of the child. Depressive symptomatology and separation anxiety were unrelated at times 1 and 2, but when the children were 6 years old, mothers who had the highest levels of anxiety tended to have more depressive symptomatology, fewer coping skills, a more negative representation of self, and embraced more traditional sex-role values. Study findings are discussed with respect to their relevance to the mother's role as developmental partner to the child and linked to major theoretical perspectives that address the mother-child relationship.