Healing in Health Care: Mental Health Promotion, Advocacy, and Voluntarism in Response to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic increased many known risk factors for mental health problems. In the context of overwhelmed health systems and resource and staffing shortages, the mental health needs of frontline health care workers (HCWs) gained attention as a major public health concern and a threat to high-quality care delivery. In response, mental health promotion initiatives were quickly developed to meet the demands of the public health crisis.

A positive parenting program to enhance positive affect in children of previously depressed mothers.

Children of mothers with a history of depression are at heightened risk for developing depression and other maladaptive outcomes. Deficits in parenting are one putative mechanism underlying this transmission of risk from mother to child. The present study evaluated whether a brief intervention with mothers with a history of depression produced greater use of positive parenting behaviors and an increase in observed positive affect in their 8- to 10-year-old children.

Promoting resilience in persons with serious mental health conditions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

This article highlights the profound and far-reaching impact of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis on persons with serious mental health conditions. To understand and mitigate against the negative effects of the crisis on this population, we offer a resilience intervention framework that attends to three key resilience processes, namely control, coherence, and connectedness (3Cs). We then detail interventions and associated evidence-informed intervention strategies at the individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels that behavioral health professionals can employ to bolster each of the 3Cs for persons with serious mental health conditions.

Flattening the emotional distress curve: A behavioral health pandemic response strategy for COVID-19.

This article proposes a framework for managing the behavioral health impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic. This framework aligns and should be integrated with an existing public health pandemic intervals model. It includes six phases of a behavioral health pandemic response strategy: preplanning, response readiness, response mobilization, intervention, continuation, and amelioration.

Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent-Child Interaction in a Children's Museum.

Parents visiting a gear exhibit at a children's museum were instructed to encourage their children (N = 65; ages 4-6) to explain, explore, or engage as usual. Instructions led to different patterns of play at the exhibit: Encouragement to explain led to greater discussion of gear mechanisms, whereas encouragement to explore led to more time connecting gears. In the explain condition, parents' questions predicted their children's discussion and further testing of gears.

Opening windows of opportunities: Evidence for interventions to prevent or treat depression in pregnant women being associated with changes in offspring's developmental trajectories of psychopathology risk.

Although animal models and correlational studies support a model of fetal programming as a mechanism in the transmission of risk for psychopathology from parents to children, the experimental studies that are required to empirically test the model with the human prenatal dyad are scarce. With a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature, we critically examined the evidence regarding the neurobiological and behavioral changes in infants as a function of randomized clinical trials to prevent or reduce maternal depression during pregnancy, treating randomized clinical trials as experiments testing the fetal programming model. Based on 25 articles that met inclusion criteria, we found support for interventions designed to change maternal prenatal mood being associated with changes in offspring functioning, but with a very small effect size.

Validating parent and child forms of the Parent Perception Inventory.

Understanding parenting from both parent and child perspectives is critical to child clinical and developmental research. Similarities and differences between parents' and children's reports can be highly informative, but only if they derive from psychometrically sound measures that assess the same parenting constructs. We examined the psychometric properties of the child and parent forms of the Parenting Perception Inventory (Bruce et al.