Biomedical subjects

Jim Stevenson

Publications and source records attributed to Jim Stevenson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2000

Editorial.

The readers of the Journal may not be aware that the Joint Editors act independently in making decisions on accepting papers for publication. This means that as an Editor I am just as intrigued as any other reader when I see a new issue of the Journal since it is likely that I will have been responsible for selecting only one third of the papers in that issue. In reading the material in this present issue I was struck by the conceptual and methodological links between a sub-set of papers that were concerned with adverse events and circumstances and their long-term sequelae; moreover, that these papers had between them some important implications for clinical practice. The first of these papers is by Dunn et al. and investigates the transmission within families of qualities of relationships. They found that father-child and mother-child relationships in stepfamilies, single-parent, and non-stepfamilies were found to be related to a number of factors. These included the parents' own earlier life course experiences, current family circumstances, and how a partner and child were getting along. The links with life course experiences meant that children were at risk of a "double dose" of less affectionate relationships in families in which parents had experienced early adversities. They found evidence for both selection effects (similarities in the early experience of both partners) and co-parenting effects (effects of one parent's relationship with a child on the other parent) and effects of biological relatedness.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2000

Editorial.

There has been a consensus that children "in care" show a much increased frequency of behavioural difficulties but the reasons why this should be so are much less well understood. The study by Roy et al. sheds important new light on this issue. They found that children admitted into residential group homes as babies are much more likely than children admitted into foster care at the same age to show hyperactivity and inattention. Although the study sample was small, the groups were closely comparable in coming from a very high-risk family background. The evidence from both questionnaire and observational measures was consistent in indicating that the difference in the pattern of rearing made a substantial difference to the child's behaviour. The findings are sobering in their implication that the pattern of care provided to protect children at high risk seemed to have acted in a detrimental manner. The study clearly provides food for thought in terms of the need to improve provision for this vulnerable group of children. The findings are also provocative in their implication that hyperactivity/inattention, although strongly influenced by the child's biology, can also be affected by the pattern of rearing. The message is that clinicians should not assume that the causes of this hyperactive behaviour necessarily reside entirely within the child but there is also the need to clarify whether the form of hyperactivity/inattention arising from these experiences is in someway atypical. The paper by Reynolds and colleagues is an attempt to evaluate the efficacy of emotional disclosure to offset distress in children experiencing negative life events. There is a developing literature on such interventions in adults but, as these authors suggest, little work has yet been done to test the value of such disclosure in children. Using a randomised controlled trial Reynolds et al. were unable to show a specific benefit from the opportunity provided to write about negative events. Rather, there was a general reduction in symptoms from all groups. Although the results suggest that the efficacy of writing about negative events is less marked in 8-13-year-olds than in adults, they also indicate that it is both feasible and potentially valuable to give children opportunities to engage in discussion about sources of stress and their reaction to them.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2000

Editorial.

It is nearly 30 years since the publication of the edited book by Rutter and Martin (1972), The child with delayed speech (London: Heinemann), which drew attention to the two-way relationship between language and behaviour. In the book the mechanisms whereby psychiatric disorders can have an involvement with language development were identified. Also, Mike Rutter suggested various ways in which delayed language development could impinge upon other aspects of psychological development. The current issue of the JCPP has a number of papers that examine the relationship between language development and aspects of cognition and behaviour. These include a long-term follow-up for a group of individuals with receptive language disorder who were first studied at about the time that the 1972 book was published.

Journal Article↗