Faculty Bibliography

Rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy developed by Albert Ellis. Developed in the 1950s, REBT was one of the earliest forms of what became known as cognitive behavioral therapy. It was successfully adapted for children and adolescents in the 1980s (Barnard & Joyce, 1984) and has been studied extensively and shown to be effective in this population (Gonzales, Nelson, & Gutkin, 2004). This article provides a selective review of the literature, and brief overview of REBT, and discusses its advantages and disadvantages.

Based on diaries he kept between the ages of 13-16, musician and author Jim Carroll's book, The Basketball Diaries, describes his harrowing descent into drug use. The descriptions in the book are useful in helping those who work with adolescent substance abusers understand their patients' experiences. Using Carroll's descriptions of his addiction, the author discusses various parameters that determine the appropriate treatment approach to the adolescent substance abuser. He discusses how Carroll's depictions of himself can be understood in light of research on motivation and readiness for change, and concludes that the evidence at age 16 does not suggest a good prognosis. Nevertheless, Carroll did survive, overcame his addiction, and made an adaptation to the drug-free adult world.

This study, using NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development longitudinal data, investigated the effects of classroom quality and students' third-grade behavioral engagement on students' third-grade reading achievement (n = 1,364) and also examined the extent to which students' third-grade behavioral engagement mediated the association between classroom quality and children's reading skills. SEM results revealed that controlling for family socio economic risk and students' first-grade reading achievement, classroom quality significantly, and positively predicted children's behavioral engagement, which in turn predicted greater reading achievement. Higher levels of children's behavioral engagement were associated with higher reading achievement. Implications for policy and practice are discussed

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common and disabling anxiety disorder that may occur in the aftermath of exposure to potentially traumatic life events. PTSD is moderately heritable, but few specific molecular variants accounting for this heritability have been identified. Genes regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, such as corticotrophin-releasing hormone type 1 receptor gene (CRHR1), have been implicated in traumatic-stress related phenotypes but have yet to be studied in relation to PTSD. The present study sought to examine the relation between 9 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CRHR1 gene and posttraumatic stress symptoms in a prospective study of pediatric injury patients (n=103) who were first assessed in the acute aftermath of their injury at the hospital. Results indicated that multiple SNPs were associated with acute symptoms at a univariate level, and after correction for multiple testing, rs12944712 was significantly related to acute PTSD symptoms. Longitudinal latent growth curve analyses suggest that rs12944712 is also related to both acute symptom level and trajectory of symptoms over time. The present study adds support for the role of CRHR1 in the stress response following potentially traumatic event exposure in youth. It should be noted that the sample size in this study was small, and therefore statistical power was low; following, results from this study should be considered preliminary. Although results are not definitive, the findings from this study warrant future replication studies on how variation in this gene relates to response to traumatic event exposure in youth

Pavlovian auditory fear conditioning involves the integration of information about an acoustic conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA). The auditory CS reaches the LA subcortically via a direct connection from the auditory thalamus and also from the auditory association cortex itself. How neural modulators, especially those activated during stress, such as norepinephrine (NE), regulate synaptic transmission and plasticity in this network is poorly understood. Here we show that NE inhibits synaptic transmission in both the subcortical and cortical input pathway but that sensory processing is biased toward the subcortical pathway. In addition binding of NE to beta-adrenergic receptors further dissociates sensory processing in the LA. These findings suggest a network mechanism that shifts sensory balance toward the faster but more primitive subcortical input