Enhancing the reach and impact of parenting interventions for toddler externalising and aggressive behaviours

Childhood externalising behaviours are associated with significant impairments in functioning and long-term negative outcomes. Physical aggression in the toddler years is both common and developmentally normal, however, longitudinal research shows that frequent physical aggression is highly stable over time and is a more robust risk factor for offending in adolescence and adulthood than other externalising behaviours. This thesis is concerned with enhancing the reach and impact of parenting interventions for toddler externalising and aggressive behaviour. Thirty years of research has demonstrated the efficacy of social learning based parenting interventions, typically 8 to 12 sessions in duration, for reducing externalising behaviour problems in childhood. However, the length of standard parenting interventions may overburden families and lead to low participation rates and high attrition rates; it may also prevent primary care health practitioners from implementing them as prescribed. Brief parenting interventions, delivered as part of a stepped care approach, may have the potential to increase the reach of parenting interventions and in turn, impact on externalising behaviour problems at the population level. This thesis reports on the findings of a randomised controlled trial which compared a standard 8 session parenting intervention to a brief 3 session intervention and a waitlist control group for reducing toddler externalising and aggressive behaviours, dysfunctional parenting and related aspects of parent functioning. Sixty-nine self-referred families with a toddler with aggressive behaviour were randomised to the respective conditions. At post-assessment, families who received the 8 session intervention showed significantly lower levels of observed child aversive behaviour, mother-rated child externalising and aggressive behaviours, dysfunctional parenting and higher levels of behavioural self-efficacy compared with waitlist. Families who received the 8 session intervention also reported lower levels of mother-rated dysfunctional parenting compared with those who received the 3 session intervention. Families who received the 3 session intervention differed from waitlist on one measure of mother-rated dysfunctional parenting. No significant group differences emerged at post-assessment for measures of parental negative affect or satisfaction with the partner relationship according to mothers, or for any father-rated measures (with the exception of behavioural self-efficacy). By six month follow-up, families who received the 8 session intervention did not differ significantly from families who received the 3 session intervention on any measure. Both mothers and fathers who received the 8 session intervention were significantly more satisfied with the intervention than those who received the 3 session intervention. Overall, the findings show greater short-term impacts of the 8 session relative to the 3 session intervention. However, medium effect sizes were found for the brief parenting intervention relative to waitlist for child aggressive behaviour and dysfunctional parenting. These effect sizes were similar to those reported in the literature for longer parenting interventions but the current study was underpowered to detect such effects. While this study provides some initial evidence that a brief parenting intervention may have significant effects on dysfunctional parenting, and may offer promise as the first step in a stepped care models of delivery, further research is needed

Many hands make light work : The facilitative role of gesture in verbal improvisation

This document is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Carine Lewis, Peter Lovatt, and Elizabeth Kirk, ‘Many hands make light work: the facilitative role of gesture in verbal improvisation’, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vol 17, pp. 149-157, September 2015, first published online 25 June 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The version of record is available online at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2015.06.001 © 2015 Elsevier. All rights reserved.Verbal improvisation is cognitively demanding, placing great burden on working memory as the speaker is tasked to generate a novel, spontaneous narrative. It is at this point of cognitive overload when individuals pursuing other creative tasks would typically shift the burden and externalise some of their thinking. How do successful verbal improvisers manage without shifting some of their workload into an external space? We argue in this paper that the improviser makes use of what is, quite literally, to hand. Ninety participants were asked to take part in a one-to-one improvisation task and a control task, order counterbalanced, in which they were engaged in a brief conversation to elicit every day speech. Participants' gestures were analysed in both conditions and improvisations rated for quality. As predicted, participants gestured significantly more in the improvisation condition. An analysis of gesture type revealed that improvising elicited greater iconic and deictic gestures, whereas everyday speech was more likely to be accompanied by self-adaptor gestures. Gesture rate was related to the quality of the improvisation, with both the strongest and weakest improvisers producing the most gestures. These gestures revealed the extent to which participants used gestures to facilitate the improvisation task. The strongest improvisers elicited a higher gesture rate for iconic and beat gestures, while weakest improvisers produced more gestures in reference to the abstract, improvisation object. Findings are discussed in relation to the idea that gesture can facilitate performance in verbal improvisation.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Master of Science

thesisSelf-explanation is a robust learning strategy, but automatic, scalable methods are needed to make it a practical strategy for large-scale implementation in classrooms. This study explored the effects of using visual interactions to engage students in self-explaining while they learned geometry using a computer-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The current study compared students who were asked to highlight diagram elements relevant to geometry principles during problem-solving against students who were not asked to highlight diagram elements. Verbal protocols generated during use of the ITS, as well as pre- and posttests targeting retention and transfer, were used to assess learning. Results showed that while the number of overall utterances did not differ across conditions, students who highlighted diagram elements produced a higher proportion of deep self-explanations that connected domain principles to problem diagrams and a lower proportion of shallow utterances that simply paraphrased diagram information (i.e., reading angles from the geometry diagrams). Shallow diagram utterances were negatively correlated with learning but deep diagram explanations were not correlated to learning. Thus, additional interactive elements may be needed to support successful self-explanation using visual interactions

Exploring the Relationship between Ego Development and Mental Health

The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between ego identity in adults (ego development), symptoms of psychological distress, and self-esteem. Ego identity was operationalized using Loevinger’s (1976) stage theory of ego development, further modified by Cook-Greuter (1994; 2010). The test used to measure ego development was the Sentence Completion Test Integral (SCTi). Symptoms of mental disorders or psychological distress were measured using Derogatis’ (1994) Symptom Checklist 90 Revised (SCL-90-Revised). Self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (RSES). It has been thought there would be noticeable differences in the relationship between ego development and the types of psychological symptoms or between ego development and self-esteem but no studies have been done to explore this (Cook-Greuter, personal communication, 2016). In summary, my hypotheses were that graduate students would have later ego development than the norms for the general population, that participants at conventional stages of ego development would report different psychological symptoms than participants at later stages of ego development, that participants in this sample who score at post-conventional levels of ego development would report more depression while those at conventional levels of ego development would endorse more anxiety, and that participants at post-conventional stage of ego development would report higher self-esteem than those at conventional levels of ego development.In this study, ego development functioned as a non-metric (ordinal) variable studied in comparison to two ratio variables (psychological symptoms endorsed and self-esteem). The SCTi tests were scored by professional raters certified by Cook-Greuter and Associates. The SCL-90-R and Rosenberg self-esteem scale were scored by the researcher and the dissertation director. Analysis of variance of all study variables was run by ego development level. Also, a process called data imputation was conducted to see if the trend-level results of the analysis would have been stronger with a larger sample. Though it was not one of my hypotheses, subjects at so-called “transitional” ego stages reported a broader array of psychological symptoms than subjects at so-called “stable” stages of ego development