Combined financial incentives and behavioral weight management to enhance adherence with gestational weight gain guidelines: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Excessive gestational weight gain, particularly among overweight and obese women, is associated with adverse perinatal outcomes. Current interventions to limit gestational weight gain have achieved only modest success.

Objective: We sought to improve adherence to gestational weight gain guidelines with a dual intervention of financial incentives and antenatal behavioral weight management.

A protocol for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression: Item scoring rules, Rater training, and outcome accuracy with data on its application in a clinical trial.

Background: We present a fully articulated protocol for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D), including item scoring rules, rater training procedures, and a data management algorithm to increase accuracy of scores prior to outcome analyses. The latter involves identifying potentially inaccurate scores as interviews with discrepancies between two independent raters on the basis of either scores >=5-point difference) or meeting threshold for depression recurrence status, a long-term treatment outcome with public health significance. Discrepancies are resolved by assigning two new raters, identifying items with disagreement per an algorithm, and reaching consensus on the most accurate scores for those items.

Parental Depression and Economic Disadvantage: The Role of Parenting in Associations with Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Children and Adolescents.

This study examined the effects of parental depression symptoms, economic disadvantage, and parenting behaviors in 180 children and adolescents of depressed parents (ages 9-15 years-old). Analyses revealed that while parental depression symptoms, economic disadvantage, and disrupted parenting behaviors were related to children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms, disrupted parenting (e.g.

Family group cognitive-behavioral preventive intervention for families of depressed parents: 18- and 24-month outcomes.

Objective: In a long-term follow-up of a randomized controlled trial (Compas et al., 2009) to examine the effects at 18- and 24-month follow-ups of a family group cognitive-behavioral (FGCB) preventive intervention for mental health outcomes for children and parents from families (N = 111) of parents with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD).

Method: Parents with a history of MDD and their 9- to 15-year-old children were randomly assigned to a FGCB intervention or a written information comparison condition.

Use of parental guilt induction among depressed parents.

This study builds on prior research by Rakow et al. (2009) by examining the role of parental guilt induction in the association between parent depressive symptoms and child internalizing problems in a sample of parents with a history of major depressive disorder. One hundred and two families with 129 children (66 males; Mage = 11.

Coping and parenting: Mediators of 12-month outcomes of a family group cognitive-behavioral preventive intervention with families of depressed parents.

Objective: In a randomized clinical trial with 111 families of parents with a history of major depressive disorder (86% mothers, 14% fathers; 86% Caucasian, 5% African-American, 3% Hispanic, 1% American Indian or Alaska Native, 4% mixed ethnicity), changes in adolescents' (mean age = 11 years; 42% female, 58% male) coping and parents' parenting skills were examined as mediators of the effects of a family group cognitive-behavioral preventive intervention on adolescents' internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

Method: Changes in hypothesized mediators were assessed at 6 months, and changes in adolescents' symptoms were measured at a 12-month follow-up.

Results: Significant differences favoring the family intervention compared with a written information comparison condition were found for changes in composite measures of parent-adolescent reports of adolescents' use of secondary control coping skills and direct observations of parents' positive parenting skills.