Including a brief substance-abuse motivational intervention in a couples treatment program for intimate partner violence

Substance abuse (SA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) frequently co-occur providing challenges to researchers and treatment professionals alike. Researchers have struggled to understand the nature of the relationship between these two difficult issues. Are they wholly un-related, indirectly related, or is there a causal relationship between the two? Treatment professionals face the dilemma of how to provide treatment to clients who abuse substances and who are violent with heir intimate others. Most treatment for these two disorders is provided separately with varying degrees of effort to coordinate them. Models of combined treatment are few, and none address couples in which both partners are violent and/or abuse substances. In this paper, we briefly review the literature on SA and IPV and then describe a brief substance abuse awareness intervention, based on Motivational Interviewing, that we have integrated into our conjoint couples treatment model for IPV

A kid-friendly tool to assess rumination in children and early adolescents: relationships with mother psychopathology and family functioning

The early identification of ruminative processes in children and early adolescents is particularly important to prevent the development of a stable ruminative style in later stages of development. The present study first aimed at validating a child-friendly tool, Kid Rumination Interview (KRI), to be used in a sample aged 7–12 years (n = 100; 50% females). Second, we hypothesized that maternal depression, family functioning and participants’ emotion regulation skills would be associated with children’ levels of rumination. Factor analysis on KRI scores yielded two main factors: personal life-related rumination and school-related rumination. Older and female participants showed higher tendencies to ruminate about school issues compared to their younger and male counterparts. A low-to-moderate correlation emerged between school-related rumination and child/early adolescent’s emotion regulation capacities. Mothers’ depressive rumination and mothers’ depressive symptoms were positively associated with children/early adolescents’ rumination about personal life and rumination about school issues. Conversely, an adequate and positive family functioning was negatively correlated with both school-related rumination and rumination about personal life. Hierarchical regression analyses pointed to a crucial role of maternal rumination and familiar rigidity in both types of rumination. Personal life-related rumination was also specifically predicted by maternal depression and family enmeshment, whereas school-related rumination was significantly associated with children/early adolescents’ emotional control and gender. Overall, the KRI appears as a promising tool to assess rumination in children/early adolescents. Results suggests partially different pathways to specific forms of ruminative thoughts