Faculty Bibliography

Dental fear affects over 20% of those presenting for treatment, leading to unnecessary pain and suffering, health and quality of life degradation, and increased financial and societal costs. In contrast to the broad dissemination of highly effective non-pharmaceutical treatment of other anxiety disorders, effective treatment of dental fear is anything but ubiquitous. Although this reflects the common-place problems for disseminating evidence based practices, it is also reflects that (a) dentists have neither the training in behavioral health treatment, nor the time, nor the reimbursement incentives to perform such treatment; (b) exceedingly few patients present to a mental health (MH) provider for dental fear; (c) there is no training or tradition placing MH providers in dental practices; and (d) all of the approximately 21 randomized, controlled trials of behavioral dental fear treatment were conducted by researchers at specialized university dental fear clinics, using participants who saw advertisements or were referred by health professionals for dental fear treatment. In this paper, we call for research (a) placing MH providers in the dental home - not just in dental fear specialty clinics - treating patients who present for dental treatment and within the confines of standard dental operations; (b) testing the acceptability and effectiveness of the intervention as administered by integrated MH professionals or by dental hygienists (a more af-fordable dissemination vector in the U.S. than dentists); (c) patient moderators of effectiveness; (d) anxiety facet and provider moderators of effectiveness; and (e) cost-effectiveness of placing dental fear treatment within the dental home

Lack of compliance has both short- and long-term costs and is a leading reason why parents seek mental health services for children. What parents do to help children comply with directives or rules is an important part of child socialization. The current review examines the relationship between a variety of parenting discipline behaviors (i.e., praise, positive nonverbal response, reprimand, negative nonverbal response) and child compliance. Forty-one studies of children ranging in age from 1(1/2) to 11 years were reviewed. Reprimand and negative nonverbal responses consistently resulted in greater compliance. Praise and positive nonverbal responses resulted in mixed child outcomes. The findings are discussed based on theory and populations studied. The authors propose a mechanism that may increase children's sensitivity to both positive and negative behavioral contingencies.