Publications by authors named "Richard O'Kearney"

Background: Addressing child disruptive behavior in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) is challenging. Therapist-facilitated, multisession, brief, online group parent training offers hope for mitigating this issue. However, trials, particularly in Asia, are limited.

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Attachment- and emotion-focused parenting interventions (AE) have grown in popularity as an alternative to behavioral parent training (BPT) for children and adolescents. AE go beneath behavior by helping parents understand and respond to their child's underlying attachment and emotional needs. Past reviews have examined their effects on attachment security and caregiver sensitivity, though less is known regarding their effects on child mental health symptoms.

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Thompson-Hollands et al.'s (2020) commentary on our systematic review of exposure-based writing therapies for subthreshold and clinical posttraumatic stress symptoms (Dawson et al., 2020) emphasizes important questions about the impact of heterogeneity in drawing inferences from evidence reviews.

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We undertook a systematic review to assess the efficacy of exposure-based writing therapies (WTs) for trauma-exposed adults with subthreshold or clinical levels of posttraumatic stress disorder. Four databases (PsycINFO, Medline, Wiley Online, PILOTS) were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of exposure-based WTs. A total of 13 RCTs that reported on results from 17 WT versus control comparisons were included.

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Despite increasing support for the distinction between primary and secondary variants of callous-unemotional features in children with disruptive behavioural disorders, evidence about whether emotion recognition deficits are only characteristic of primary CU is inconclusive. We tested whether, in young children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD; N = 74), level of affective arousal moderated the association between CU and performance on behavioural measures of emotional abilities. The association between CU and emotion recognition abilities was dependent on the child's level of affective arousal with higher CU associated with poorer emotion recognition abilities for ODD children with lower affective arousal (r = - 0.

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Although the quality of the parent-teen relationship is key to understanding both psychopathology and well-being in adolescence, there are limited assessments of adolescents' underlying attitudes regarding their parents. This study aimed to evaluate a novel and brief method of coding adolescents' 3-min speech samples regarding their affective attitudes (e.g.

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Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history.

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An attentional bias to threat is an important maintaining and possibly aetiological factor for social anxiety. Despite this, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of threat biases, such as the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up attention. In order to measure attentional bias toward threat, the current study employed a variation of the dot-probe task in which participants' attention was initially cued to the left or right side of the screen before an angry face paired with a neutral face was displayed, and subsequently participants responded to a probe in the locus of one of the faces.

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While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability.

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Objective: This review examines the evidence from head-to-head randomised controlled trials addressing whether the efficacy of cognitive-behavioural therapy for anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorders in adults delivered by computer or online (computer- and Internet-delivered cognitive-behavioural therapy) is not inferior to in-person cognitive-behavioural therapy for reducing levels of symptoms and producing clinically significant gains at post-treatment and at follow-up. A supplementary aim is to examine the evidence for severity as a moderator of the relative efficacy of computer- and Internet-delivered cognitive-behavioural therapy and in-person cognitive-behavioural therapy.

Method: PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase and Cochrane database of randomised trials were searched for randomised controlled trials of cognitive-behavioural therapy for these disorders with at least an in-person cognitive-behavioural therapy and Internet or computer cognitive-behavioural therapy arm.

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We investigate perception of, and responses to, facial expression authenticity for the first time in social anxiety, testing genuine and polite smiles. Experiment 1 (= 141) found perception of smile authenticity was unaffected, but that approach ratings, which are known to be reduced in social anxiety for happy faces, are more strongly reduced for genuine than polite smiles. Moreover, we found an independent contribution of social anxiety to approach ratings, over and above general negative affect (state/trait anxiety, depression), for genuine smiles, and not for polite ones.

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We report a systematic review of moderators of CBT efficacy for pediatric OCD relative to other treatments. CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO were searched for RCTs reporting on effect moderation for CBT outcomes. Five studies (N = 365) examined 17 variables with three significant moderators identified.

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In everyday social interactions, people's facial expressions sometimes reflect genuine emotion (e.g., anger in response to a misbehaving child) and sometimes do not (e.

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Latent growth curve modelling was used to contrast the developmental trajectories of hyperactivity-inattention (H-I) problems across childhood for children with a language difficulty at the start of school and those with typical language and to examine if the presence of a language difficulty moderates the associations of child, parent and peer predictors with these trajectories. Unconditional and language-status conditional latent growth curves of H-I problems were estimated for a large nationally representative cohort of children, comprising 1627 boys (280 - language difficulty) and 1609 girls (159 - language difficulty) measured at age 4 to 5, 6 to 7, 8 to 9 and 10 to 11. Multiple regression tested interaction between language status and predictors of the level and slope of the trajectory of H-I problems.

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In this narrative review, we suggest that children's language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children's self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children's early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age.

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In recent years, many assessment and care units for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been set up in order to detect, diagnose and to properly manage this complex disorder, but there is no consensus regarding the key functions that these units should perform. The International College of Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders (ICOCS) together with the Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders Network (OCRN) of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) and the Anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Section of the World Psychiaric Association (WPA) has developed a standards of care programme for OCD centres. The goals of this collaborative initiative are promoting basic standards, improving the quality of clinical care and enhance the validity and reliability of research results provided by different facilities and countries.

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Most studies of emotion abilities in disruptive children focus on emotion expression recognition. This study compared 74 children aged 4-8 years with ODD to 45 comparison children (33 healthy; 12 with an anxiety disorder) on behaviourally assessed measures of emotion perception, emotion perspective-taking, knowledge of emotions causes and understanding ambivalent emotions and on parent-reported cognitive and affective empathy. Adjusting for child's sex, age and expressive language ODD children showed a paucity in attributing causes to emotions but no other deficits relative to the comparison groups.

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This study distinguished between different subclusters of autistic traits in the general population and examined the relationships between these subclusters, looking at the eyes of faces, and the ability to recognize facial identity. Using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) measure in a university-recruited sample, we separate the social aspects of autistic traits (i.e.

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This study uses latent growth curve modelling to contrast the developmental trajectories of conduct problems across childhood for children with early language difficulties (LD) and those with typical language (TL). It also examines whether the presence of early language difficulties moderates the influence of child, parent and peers factors known to be associated with the development of conduct problems. Unconditional and language status conditional latent growth curves of conduct problems were estimated for a nationally representative cohort of children, comprising of 1627 boys (280 LD) and 1609 girls (159 LD) measured at ages 4-5, 6-7, 8-9 and 10-11.

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Much is known about development of the ability to label facial expressions of emotion (e.g., as happy or sad), but rather less is known about the emergence of more complex emotional face processing skills.

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Three theoretical explanations for the affective facet of psychopathy were tested in individuals with high levels of callous unemotional (CU) traits. Theory 1 (Blair) proposes specific difficulties in processing others' distress (particularly fear). Theory 2 (Dadds) argues for lack of attention to the eyes of faces.

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Background: Language impairments are associated with an increased likelihood of emotional difficulties later in childhood or adolescence, but little is known about the impact of LI on the growth of emotional problems.

Aims: To examine the link between early language status (language impaired (LI), typical language (TL)) and the pattern and predictors of growth in emotional difficulties from school entry to the start of high school in a large cohort of Australian children.

Methods & Procedures: Unconditional latent growth curves of emotional difficulties were modelled across four waves (ages 4-5, 6-7, 8-9 and 10-11) using data from 1627 boys (280 LI, 1347 TL) and 1609 girls (159 LI, 1450 TL).

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Most developmental studies of face emotion processing show faces in isolation, in the absence of any broader context. Here we investigate two types of interactions between expression and threat contexts. First, in adults, following of another person's direction of social attention is increased when that person shows fear and the context requires vigilance for danger.

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