Caregiver sensitivity builds a basis for children's sense of security and effective emotion regulation during their development. Applying a cross-cultural lens, caregiver sensitivity can be divided into two subtypes, reactive and proactive, and its prevalence and meaning may differ across cultures. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of developmental niche and parental ethnotheories, the current study examines culture-specific meanings of caregiver sensitivity across five countries: India, Nepal, Korea, the United States of America (USA), and Germany.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild labourers are more likely to have experienced physical victimisation, which may increase risk for anxiety/depression, by shaping threat biases in information-processing. To target threat biases and vulnerability for anxiety/depression, we evaluated whether Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) training could be feasibly and acceptably delivered to rescued youth labourers. Seventy-six physically abused rescued labourers aged 14-17 (40 from Nepal, 36 from India) in out-of-home care institutions received either multi-session computerised CBM or control training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Young people who have experienced early-life maltreatment preferentially attend to threat and draw more threatening interpretations. In turn, these threat biases may explain elevated risk for lifelong anxiety and/or depression. We investigated whether adolescent labourers with a history of physical abuse showed threat biases relative to non-abused labourers, and whether these threat biases associated with anxiety and depression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild labourers are at risk of poorer mental health and once rescued require urgent mental health interventions to ameliorate the long-term impact. In our review, only two published scientific studies evaluated custom-made interventions; other programmes were obtained from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which need rigorous trial evaluation. We also sought the viewpoints of stakeholders working directly with rescued young people, as well as consulting young people with lived experiences of child labour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Although the prevalence and mental health consequences of childhood maltreatment among adolescents have been studied widely, there are few data addressing these issues in Asian lower middle-income countries. Here, we assessed the prevalence and types of childhood maltreatment and, for the first time, examined their association with current mental health problems in Indian adolescents with a history of child work.
Methods: One hundred and thirty-two adolescents (12-18 years; 114 males, 18 females) with a history of child work were interviewed using the Child Maltreatment, Conventional Crime, and Witnessing and Indirect Victimisation modules of the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire.
Background: Tendencies to attend to threatening cues in the environment and to interpret ambiguous situations with negative/hostile intent maintain and may even precipitate internalizing and externalizing problems in young people with a history of maltreatment. Challenging maladaptive information-processing styles using cognitive bias modification (CBM) training may reduce symptoms.
Aims: To investigate the acceptability of CBM training in nine young people attending alternate education provision units in the UK, and 10 young people living in out-of-home care institutions in Nepal with a history of maltreatment.
Objectives: Little is known about rates of childhood maltreatment in low-income countries, particularly among marginalised sectors of society. Economic hardships mean that in such countries, many children and young people are exploited in the labour force and/or are trafficked, placing them at greater risk for being exposed to other forms of maltreatment. Cultural norms endorsing the use of physical and emotional acts to discipline children further exacerbate this risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Anxiety in adolescence is characterised by disturbances in attentional processes and the overgeneralisation of fear, however, little is known about the combined and reciprocal effects of and between these factors on youth anxiety. The present study investigated whether attention (attention allocation and control) and fear generalisation processes together predict more variance on adolescent anxiety symptoms than each factor in isolation, and explored their interrelations.
Methods: 197 adolescents completed a novel conditioning task, which paired balloon cues with mildly aversive or neutral outcomes.
Context: In April 2015, a major earthquake struck northern regions of Nepal affecting one-third of the population, and many suffered mental health problems.
Aims: This study aimed to conduct a preliminary investigation of prevalence and feasibility of brief therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among earthquake survivors.
Settings And Design: This is an exploratory cross-sectional study of prevalence and feasibility of brief trauma-focused therapy for PTSD among survivors 3 and 11 months after the earthquake in affected areas near Kathmandu.