Heather M Foran

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt · Institute of Psychology

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant public health concern. To date, risk factor research has not differentiated physical violence that leads to injury and/or fear (i.e., clinically significant IPV; CS-IPV) from general physical IPV. Isolating risk relations is necessary to best inform prevention and treatment efforts. The current study...

Over the past 40 years, a large body of literature has documented intimate partner relationship distress as a primary reason for seeking mental health services as well as an integral factor in the prognosis and treatment of a range of mental and physical health conditions. In recognition of its relevance to clinical care, the description of intimat...

Therapists have a responsibility to ascertain if psychological aggression, physical aggression, sexual aggression exist, and if there is fear of the partner. A fear of partner measure was evaluated in 100 couples who sought relationship feedback. Fear of partner's psychological, physical, and sexual aggression was related to actual reports of such...

The aim of this study was to evaluate a brief couple therapy for depression targeted for mildly discordant or nondiscordant couples struggling with the negative impact of depression. Subjects included women with major depression or dysthymia who had husbands without clinical depression. Thirty-five couples were randomly assigned to the 5-week inter...

Purpose The prevalence of parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children, varies dramatically across countries and is highest in Western countries characterized by high individualism. Method In this study, we examined the mediators of the relationship between individualism measured at the country level and...

Context: Evidence suggests that teen dating violence (TDV) is associated with long-term adverse outcomes, but these associations have not been systematically assessed. Objectives: To conduct a systematic review of the longitudinal associations between TDV and negative outcomes, including mental and physical health, reoccurrence of violence in in...

The aim was to examine the relationship between caregiver's mental health (parental psychological distress, and parenting stress), dysfunctional parenting (lax or overreactive parenting), and the screen media use in understanding attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms of children within an integrated model framework. Familial fact...

What is it to be “an ideal parent”? Does the answer differ across countries and social classes? To answer these questions in a way that minimizes bias and ethnocentrism, we used open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs among 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers from 37 countries. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis was utilized to first det...

Importance: Sexual violence is a public health problem that affects adolescents globally. To our knowledge, no meta-analysis of prevention programs for adolescent sexual violence has been conducted. Objective: To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of psychosocial programs for preve...

Background: The Parenting for Lifelong Health for Young Children (PLH-YC) programme aims to reduce violence against children and child behaviour problems among families in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Although the programme has been tested in four randomised controlled trials and delivered in over 25 countries, there are gaps in under...

Purpose The prevalence of parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children, varies dramatically across countries and is highest in Western countries characterized by high individualism. Method In this study, we examined the mediators of the relationship between individualism measured at the country level and...

Parental engagement in parenting programs is essential for good outcomes but can be challenging for many families. In low- and middle-income countries, where resources are limited and there are fewer support services, there is little research examining the factors that influence engagement. This mixed-methods study explored factors associated with...

Benefit finding has been identified as a buffer of the combat exposure-PTSD symptom link in soldiers. However, benefit finding may have a limited buffering capacity on the combat-PTSD symptom link over the course of a soldier’s post-deployment recovery period. In the present study, soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) were surveyed...

This conceptual review summarizes two decades of research on conflict management behaviors and their implications for family functioning. We review the accumulated research on the impact of three common conflict resolution strategies – destructive interparental conflict, constructive interparental conflict, and intimate partner violence – on parent...

This study assessed the psychometric properties of three versions of the Parenting Scale (PS; original PS, 13‐item version, and 10‐item version) in three European middle‐income countries. The PS is one of the most frequently used questionnaires for measuring dysfunctional discipline strategies. Although its validity has been extensively investigate...

Background Parents often search the web for health-related information for themselves or on behalf of their children, which may impact their health-related decision-making and behaviors. In particular, searching for somatic symptoms such as headaches, fever, or fatigue is common. However, little is known about how psychological and relational facto...

Teen Psychological Dating Violence (TPDV) is a serious public health concern. However, there is limited evidence on the capacity of programs to prevent this form of violence. This study aimed to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs to evaluate the efficacy of prevention programs for TPDV. PsycINFO/Eric/PsycArticles, PubMed and Web...

Understanding risk factors for relationship dissolution and poor relationship adjustment among couples has been an active area of research in relationship science. One risk factor, non-marital cohabitation, has shown to predict higher rates of relationship dissolution and relationship instability in some samples, but the associations among German p...

In Western countries, recent decades have witnessed a revolution toward gender equality. Inequalities have been greatly reduced in areas such as education or employment. Because inequalities lead to distress, this development has largely benefited women. One notable exception is the realm of parenting, which has remained rife with inequalities even...

Parental burnout (PB), a relatively new and under-studied construct, is defined as a condition resulting from chronic parenting stress. While recent research confirmed its negative associations with familial variables, such as relationship satisfaction and positive parenting practices, little is known about the role of intimate partner violence (IP...

Background Childhood adversities, such as poor parental practices, exposure to violence, and risk behaviours strongly impact children’s future mental and behavioural problems. Adversities affect families living in disadvantaged environments and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to a greater extent than in high-income countries. Parenting pro...

Importance Sexual and physical dating violence is prevalent among adolescents and is associated with adverse health effects. Objective To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials to assess the efficacy of prevention programs for sexual and physical dating violence in adolescents. Data Sources Search terms were c...

The prevalence of child emotional and behavioral problems is an international problem but is higher in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) where there are often less mental health supports for families. Parenting programs can be an effective means of prevention, but must be low-cost, scalable, and suitable for the local context. The RISE projec...

Use of dyadic modeling in nursing has theoretical and practical importance, as the interpersonal processes related to health behaviors can be captured. Theoretical models focusing on dyadic coping with chronic illness and illness management are established in family nursing. However, few studies utilized dyadic designs in empirical research, as mos...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious public health problem associated with increased risk of developing mental health conditions. Assessment of IPV in mental health settings is important for appropriate treatment planning and referral; however, lack of training in how to identify and respond to IPV presents a significant barrier to assessme...

BACKGROUND Parents often search the web for health-related information for themselves or on behalf of their children, which may impact their health-related decision-making and behaviors. In particular, searching for somatic symptoms such as headaches, fever, or fatigue is common. However, little is known about how psychological and relational facto...

High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71...

Ending all violence against children by 2030 is a core part of Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 16. A number of promising violence reduction strategies have been identified in research studies. However, we lack an understanding of the implementation and impact of these programs in respect to their delivery at a large scale or within existing ser...

High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71...

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak and the measures to contain the global pandemic can have an impact on the well-being and mental health status of individuals. Parents of young children are particularly at risk for high levels of parental stress due to the current public health crisis, which can impact parenting behaviors and children’s well-being....

Smoking is a major public health problem in Austria, but relevant research and intervention is limited. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the present study aimed to test the model utility in an Austrian sample. As future self-continuity is likely to impact on health behavior, we also hypothesized an extended TPB with future self-contin...

The quality of close family relationships can affect the health and well-being of older adults. Further, research suggests that relationships between grandparents and adult grandchildren can have a positive impact on the lives of each generation, particularly regarding social and emotional support. Social engagement technologies may provide new opp...

Background: Parents use the Internet commonly for themselves and to search for information about their children's health. However, health-related information from the web has the potential to trigger anxiety and stress. The understanding of contributing factors for distress during health-related information search processes and which factors could...

The quality of the parent–child relationship is crucial for early childhood development and has consequences for health and well‐being throughout the lifespan. Prevention programs and therapies, such as parent training and systemic family therapy, can lead to improvements in the parent–child relationship, but still tend to be underutilized from a p...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 outbreak and the measures to contain the global pandemic can have an impact on the well-being and mental health status of individuals. Parents of young children are particularly at risk for high levels of parental stress due to the current public health crisis, which can impact parenting behaviors and children’s well-being....

Familial influences on children's cigarette smoking have been established, yet little is known about whether these influences in childhood relate to offspring's smoking behavior in adolescence. Drawing on prior work showing that children's emotional and behavioral problems (i.e., internalizing and externalizing behavior problems) are influenced by...

Family relationships remain one of the most valuable and meaningful human experiences, within and outside of the military, and when loss or conflict occurs, this has profound effects on individuals and society. Furthermore, family support can influence occupational outcomes such as recruitment, retention, and military readiness. Family loyalty to t...

Background Parents commonly use the internet to search for information about their child’s health-related symptoms and guide parental health-related decisions. Despite the impact of parental online health seeking on offline health behaviors, this area of research remains understudied. Previous literature has not adequately distinguished searched be...

The quality of the parent–child relationship is crucial for early childhood development and has consequences for health and well‐being throughout the lifespan. Prevention programs and therapies, such as parent training and systemic family therapy, can lead to improvements in the parent–child relationship, but still tend to be underutilized from a p...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2020.00115.].

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended that clinicians screen patients for intimate partner violence (IPV). This article aims to develop and test the first screeners for clinically significant physical and psychological IPV (i.e., acts meeting criteria in the International Classification of Diseases (11th ed.; ICD-11; World Health...

BACKGROUND Parents commonly use the internet to search for information about their child’s health-related symptoms and guide parental health-related decisions. Despite the impact of parental online health seeking on offline health behaviors, this area of research remains understudied. Previous literature has not adequately distinguished searched be...

Background: Hunger can influence healthy development of children and has been shown to be associated with other determinants of child health, such as violence within the family and maternal (mental) health problems. Whilst the majority of research has been conducted in high-income countries with vulnerable populations, less is known about the circu...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global public health problem that has been shown to lead to serious mental health consequences. Due to its frequent co-occurrence with psychiatric disorders, it is important to assess for IPV in mental health settings to improve treatment planning and referral. However, lack of training in how to identify and re...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global public health problem that has been shown to lead to serious mental health consequences. Due to its frequent co-occurrence with psychiatric disorders, it is important to assess for IPV in mental health settings to improve treatment planning and referral. However, lack of training in how to identify and re...

Background Parents commonly use the internet to search for information about their child’s health-related symptoms and guide parental health-related decisions. Despite the importance of parental search behaviors, this area of research remains understudied and no comprehensive review of this research area has been conducted. Our aim is to summarize...

Background Older adults often face problems with social isolation, which is a risk factor for poorer mental and physical health. New forms of social technologies (e.g., WhatsApp) provide opportunities to facilitate social connectedness with family members. Understanding older adults’ behaviors and perceptions related to digital communication tools...

Background: Child mental health problems continue to be a major global concern, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Parenting interventions have been shown to be effective for reducing child behavior problems in high-income countries, with emerging evidence supporting similar effects in LMICs. However, there remain substantial...

Background Biopsychosocial models have proposed mechanisms through which parental aggression may effect children's emotional development and health. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between parental physical and psychological aggression and adolescent health status ten years later and determine if this relationship can be expla...

Introduction Families in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) face multiple challenges (eg, poverty and adverse childhood experiences) that increase the risk for child mental health problems, while the context may provide them with few resources. Existing prevention-oriented parenting programmes have been shown to be effective in reducing...

Early mental and behavioral disorders are significant predictors of psychopathologies in adulthood. Parenting behavior (e.g., overreactivity and laxness) influences the development of behavioral problems in children. It is thus often assessed in therapeutic settings, as well as in the context of intervention studies. The aim of this study was to de...

Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression - edited by Alexander T. Vazsonyi

Purpose: The prevalence of children who are overweight or obese has been increasing worldwide. While a variety of biological as well as sociodemographic correlates have been identified and reviewed, a systematic review of psychosocial factors, particularly among preschool aged children, is lacking. This systematic review synthesizes the research on...

Dysfunctional conflict resolution behaviors in couples have been long recognized as markers of relationship maladjustment and are, consequently, frequent targets of couple therapy. The process of flooding may play a role. Flooding is the subjective sense of being overwhelmed by the partner’s negative affect, which is perceived as unexpected and int...

Background/Objective: Intimate partner relationship problems and intimate partner abuse and neglect — referred to in this paper as “relational problems and maltreatment” — have substantial and well-documented impact on both physical and mental health. However, classification guidelines, such as those found in the International Classification of Dis...

Mothers and children of single or unstable relationships have higher rates of mental health problems than those in stable two-parent families. Despite results that mothers and children of conflictual two-parent families also show impairments, most studies do not consider relationship quality. Therefore, the present study combines relationship statu...

The current study examined the impact of active duty service members’ symptoms following a combat deployment on child mental health symptoms. Soldiers from a brigade combat team (N = 974) participated in the study 2 months following return from a 15-month combat deployment to Afghanistan, of which 169 soldiers (17.3%) reported having at least one c...

Effective community-based prevention requires an understanding of risk and protective factors in the population of interest. This article consolidates myriad risk and protective factor studies on family violence, alcohol abuse, and suicidality investigating various ecological levels (individual, family, workplace, and community) in random populatio...

Behavioral observations of families have provided valuable insights into emotional communication and conflict behaviors, but coding is time consuming and expensive. Automated coding systems may provide a cost effective alternative, particularly for coding emotional communication. Emotion communication and regulation in couple interactions are viewe...

Marital status and gender are two demographic characteristics with relevance for understanding risk for social and psychological difficulties such as mental health problems and intimate partner violence. This is particularly true in military populations where resources and social support may vary among the subgroups of single male servicemembers, s...

The prevalence of risky sexual behaviors rises during adolescence. Younger adolescents with risky sexual behavior show lower rates of safe sex, more frequent sexual intercourse while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and rarely get tested and treated for sexually transmitted diseases. These practices are also accompanied by psychological an...

Although posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is used as a distinct diagnosis in clinical practice, its symptoms were characterized as a dimensional structure in several taxometric analyses. However, a categorical latent structure of PTSD could be superimposed by using indistinct PTSD symptoms that can appear within the framework of other trauma-in...

Parents who are overwhelmed by the intensity and aversive nature of child negative affect - those who are experiencing flooding - may be less likely to react effectively and instead may focus on escaping the aversive situation, disciplining either overly permissively or punitively to escape quickly from child negative affect. However, there are no...

A fundamental question facing every latent construct (e.g., relationship quality) is whether the construct is categorical or dimensional in nature. The authors analyzed the latent status of relationship quality in 3 large general German population samples using the Partnership Questionnaire (PFB), the Quality of Relationship Inventory, and the shor...

Efforts to expand and update the description of relational processes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to enhance its clinical utility began with DSM-IV, but met with limited success. The current effort to revise the description of relational problems has focused on both the DSM-V and the International Classificatio...

Nuanced, multifaceted, and content valid diagnostic criteria for intimate partner violence (IPV) have been created and can be used reliably in the field even by those with little-to-no clinical training/background. The use of such criteria such as these would likely lead to more reliable decision making in the field and more consistency across stud...

Child maltreatment is widespread and has a tremendous impact on child victims and their families. Over the past decade, definitions of child maltreatment have been developed that are operationalized, face valid, and can be reliably applied in clinical settings. These definitions have informed the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American...

Korperliche Bestrafung ist in Deutschland keine Randerscheinung und mit einer Vielzahl von negativen Folgen fur die leidtragenden Kinder verbunden. Mangelnde erzieherische Fahigkeiten gelten hierbei als ein bedeutender Risikofaktor fur physische Disziplinarmasnahmen. Demnach erscheinen Elterntrainings als sinnvolle Masnahme zur Reduzierung der Prav...

Interdependencies between dyads have long been recognized and taken into account in the analysis of partnership and marital data. However, most of the research that has examined dyadic influences is based on cross-sectional data or basic longitudinal models. When more complex longitudinal models are examined, several limitations and barriers arise....

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant public health concern. This study proposed and tested an ecological model of both general and clinically significant (i.e., injurious or fear-evoking) IPV perpetration (IPVPerp). Risk and promotive factors from multiple ecological levels of influence (i.e., individual, family, workplace, community) w...

The goal of the present study was to investigate potential mechanisms of previously documented treatment effects for a brief, 5-session, problem-focused couple therapy for depression in a sample of 35 depressed women and their nondepressed husbands. The primary treatment effects were reducing women's depressive symptoms and their husbands' psycholo...

In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland wachst fast jedes funfte Kind in einer 1-Elternfamilie auf. Alleinerziehende Mutter und deren Kinder sind dabei haufig von erhohten psychischen Belastungen bzw. Auffalligkeiten betroffen. Fur eine gezielte Unterstutzung ist die Kenntnis des Wirkzusammenhangs zwischen dem Familienstatus und der kindliche Belastung v...