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.

Hazardous alcohol use is a well-established risk factor for men's intimate partner violence (IPV), with dozens of studies demonstrating the association. The current study extends understanding of the hazardous alcohol use-IPV link by examining what factors moderate this association in a more systematic and broader way that has been done in past studies. Individual, family, workplace, community, and developmental factors were tested as moderators of the hazardous alcohol use and IPV link in a large, representative sample of active duty service members (the 2006 Community Assessment), and the results were tested for replicability in a hold-out sample. Two family variables (relationship satisfaction and parent-child satisfaction), 1 community variable (community safety), and 3 developmental variables (years in the military, marital length, and family income/pay grade) cross-validated as significant moderators of the association between men's hazardous alcohol use and IPV. Across the significant moderators, the association between hazardous alcohol use and men's IPV was weakened by maturation/development, improved community safety, and better relationship functioning. No individual or workplace variables were significant moderators for men, and there were no significant moderators found for women. The results support the importance of a developmental and relational perspective to understanding the hazardous alcohol use-IPV link, rather than solely an individual coping perspective.

Historically, the political context of partner physical aggression policy and research has focused on protection of physically victimized women and mandated interventions for male batterers. This emphasis is understandable when one considers the injuries and deaths of women by men. However, physical aggression against partners among teens is a very different phenomenon than battering. Intimate partner violence (IPV) in the form of physical aggression, the focus of this review, often starts in junior high school, and approximately 35% of male and female senior high school students report engaging in IPV. The specific trajectory of IPV varies by sample, but IPV appears to decrease in the late teens or early 20s. IPV is generally reported by both males and females, and not attributable to self-defense. IPV is significantly stable in couples who remain together, but stability appears lower if partners change. Given the importance of physical aggression by both males and females, prevention and early intervention programs need to address relationship factors, and targeted prevention and early intervention would be prudent with young high-risk couples. Decades of intervention programs for batterers have not proven very successful, and IPV appears easier to prevent than treat. Thus, emphasis on prevention of IPV seems both timely and promising. This review is intended for diverse audiences including educational administrators, policy makers, and researchers. It reviews issues such as who and when to target for IPV prevention programs, and it summarizes data relevant to these issues.

Objectives: Using the actor-partner interdependence model (Kenny, 1996), the current study is the first to examine: (1) the relation among 4 forms of family-of-origin aggression (FOA), namely, father-to-mother, mother-to-father, father-to-child, and mother-to-child aggression, and subsequent experience with physical intimate partner violence (IPV) at the couple level; and (2) the gender-specific intergenerational transmission hypothesis. Method: A representative sample of 453 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples from the U.S. northeast completed self-report measures of IPV and FOA as part of a larger study on family and relationship violence. Results: Although both individuals' (respondent effects) and partners' (partner effects) FOA histories generally predicted physical IPV victimization and perpetration, dual-FOA couples were not at increased risk for TV. Respondents' interparental and partners' parent-to-child aggression experiences were most predictive of IPV. Gender-specific transmission of aggression across generations was only partially supported. Last, mother-to-child aggression was a significant predictor in 3 of the 4 models. Conclusions: Findings support the intergenerational transmission of aggression (Widom, 1989) and social learning/cognitive (Bandura, 1977, 1997) theories, and suggest that both partners' IPV and FOA (which often includes multitype maltreatment) experiences should be assessed and considered when developing prevention and treatment programs. Violence prevention parent training programs are also discussed.