Joseph Strayhorn

• M.D.
• Chair at Organization for Psychoeducational Tutoring, Inc., Ithaca, NY

Trendy depictions of nonsuicidal self-injury in the media appear to promote real-life self-injury, according to an analysis by Lee and colleagues1, published in this issue. The researchers studied rates of emergency visits to all hospitals in Korea for self-injury, before and after video broadcasts disseminated a song called "Barcode." The song com...

Randomized controlled trials are ubiquitously spoken of as the “gold standard” for testing interventions and establishing causal relations. This article presents evidence for two premises. First: there are often major problems with randomized designs; it is by no means true that the only good design is a randomized design. Second: the method of vir...

How should treatment be initiated for children with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)? This editorial comments on an article by Melin and colleagues,1 published in this issue, from the NordLOTS study, which reports excellent outcomes from cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for children with OCD. Children continued to improve after CBT was discontin...

Lead is toxic to cognitive and behavioral functioning in children even at levels well below those producing physical symptoms. Continuing efforts in the U.S. since about the 1970s to reduce lead exposure in children have dramatically reduced the incidence of elevated blood lead levels (with elevated levels defined by the current U.S. Centers for Di...

A. Diamond and K. Lee's review “Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old” (special section on Investing Early in Education, 19 August, p. [959][1]) leaves the impression that martial arts training as usually delivered enhances executive functions.

Martial arts studios for children market their services as providing mental health outcomes such as self-esteem, self-confidence, concentration, and self-discipline. It appears that many parents enroll their children in martial arts in hopes of obtaining such outcomes. The current study used the data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kin...

The children of teen mothers have been reported to have higher rates of several unfavorable mental health outcomes. Past research suggests several possible mechanisms for an association between religiosity and teen birth rate in communities. The present study compiled publicly accessible data on birth rates, conservative religious beliefs, income,...

This study tested the feasibility of tutoring children in reading via telephone sessions. 19 children received tutoring from any of 6 tutors for an average of 7.6 hr. per month. Initially, these children were an average of 10.4 yr. old, in average Grade 4.8, and averaged 2.9 grade levels behind their grade expectations on the Slosson Oral Reading T...

This study tested the feasibility of tutoring children in reading via telephone sessions. 19 children received tutoring from any of 6 tutors for an average of 7.6 hr. per month. Initially, these children were an average of 10.4 yr. old, in average Grade 4.8, and averaged 2.9 grade levels behind their grade expectations on the Slosson Oral Reading T...

Children in Grades K-5, selected for reading and behavior problems, received individual tutoring in a program which aimed to detail a hierarchy of reading skills, locate the point on the hierarchy at which each child should work, and provide enthusiastic social reinforcement for successes. Children were randomly assigned to higher or lower frequenc...

Children who display symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in classrooms are reputed to display fewer symptoms in one-on-one interaction. We tested this hypothesis with children who received tutoring for reading and behavior problems. We selected 30 children whose teacher-rated ADHD symptoms fit a pattern consistent with DSM c...

Selected literature is reviewed regarding the question, How may children's self-control skills be developed or improved through training? It is premature to give up on psychosocial methods of training self-control. Self-control is fostered by being in a long-term positive relationship with a dependable person who communicates the value of this goal...

Theory and research on self-control were reviewed. Selected research is summarized along with some conclusions from clinical practice. Self-control difficulties are of central importance for many psychiatric disorders. Self-control is also a crucial, and often missing, ingredient for success in most treatment programs. It is stable enough to be con...

Cyproheptadine is an antihistamine and serotonin antagonist given to children for allergies, migraine headaches, and growth problems. A 5-year-old boy began to have episodes of violent behavior after the initiation of cyproheptadine therapy. After cyproheptadine was discontinued, the aggression ceased over the course of a few weeks. Although there...

The goal of preventing mental and behavioral disorders requires that important psychological and social interactional skills be transmitted to developing generations in the most effective manner possible. This article examines the evidence for the following hypotheses: (a) that positive, friendly, kind, cooperative interactions are highly relevant...

The effects of methods used to improve the interrater reliability of reviewers' ratings of manuscripts submitted to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry were studied. Reviewers' ratings of consecutive manuscripts submitted over approximately 1 year were first analyzed; 296 pairs of ratings were studied. Intraclass...

A measure of prosocial choice in story dilemmas was created by adding 23 stories to an original 4 studied by Eisenberg-Berg and Hand (1979). Each story called upon the child to make either a prosocial or a hedonistic choice in the hypothetical situation. Adding more items improved the internal consistency of the measure, as predicted by the Spearma...

There was once an era in which “medical model” thinking and learning theory were seen as opposed and mutually exclusive, as if mental health practitioners could handle only one major conceptual model. Inclusion of this chapter in a book on behavior therapy represents the growing consensus that human behavior is complex enough to require more than o...

The effects of children's ages at entrance to first grade upon success in elementary school was examined in a cohort of urban children who entered first grade in 1983. A set of demographic, social, and early experience variables was used as covariates in the analysis. Older children did slightly, but significantly better academically in first grade...

A preventive mental health intervention previously reported found positive effects in a parent-child interaction training program on attention deficit and internalizing symptoms of low-income preschool children as rated by parents. Families were randomly assigned to a "minimal treatment" control group or a more extensive treatment experimental grou...

A rating scale, the Psychological Skills Inventory, was completed by a sample of parents of Head Start children, as well as by research assistants who observed these children in classrooms. The scale yields a total score, plus a subscale score for each of 22 psychological skills. The scale demonstrated high internal consistency (coefficient alpha =...

The Preschool Symptom Self-Report (PRESS) is a pictorial instrument designed to facilitate the self-report of depressive symptoms by preschool children. It was tested with a sample of 84 Head Start children and their parents and teachers. A parent-teacher version of the instrument correlated with other measures designed for adult rating of children...

This article presents two methods of quantifying the adequacy with which research data have been checked in the process of quality control. In the duplicate performance method, the data operation is carried out twice, independently, and the results are compared; the remaining errors in the data set can be estimated thereby and a confidence limit ca...

A modification of a scale to measure religiousness, first published by Kauffman (1979), was constructed and administered to a sample of parents of Head Start children; respondents were predominantly low-income, Black mothers of the enrolled children. The scale was administered on two test occasions, along with measures of parent and child psycholog...

A preventive mental health intervention was tested with low income parent-child dyads. Parents who were having a problem with the behavior of their preschool child were recruited; 89 parents, of 96 children, completed pre- and postintervention assessments. Families were randomly assigned to a "minimal treatment" control group or a more extensive tr...

The Parent Practices Scale, a self-report instrument on parents' patterns of interaction with their preschool children, has 34 items on practices frequently targeted in the clinical practice of parent training. In a sample of low-income parents, the scale had good internal consistency and 6-month stability. It was significantly associated with meas...

A single-case experiment testing the effectiveness of methylphenidate in a 6-year-old autistic boy was performed by randomly assigning treatment days to placebo or active drug, collecting daily blind ratings of behavior from the child's mother and from teachers, and statistically comparing the ratings for drug days with those for placebo days. Nega...

In psychosocial outcome research, as contrasted to pharmacologic research, control groups receiving inert treatment, designed to raise expectations but otherwise provide no service, are almost never indicated; this is true because of methodologic as well as ethical reasons. Four types of comparisons suffice as alternatives: treatment versus no trea...

Concepts commonly useful to therapists in deciding upon the direction of psychotherapy are collated into a diagnostic axis, using the language of skills. It is argued that this skills axis has more therapeutic relevance than a symptom-cluster scheme, is less pejorative than personality disorder labels, lends itself to scientific grounding, would pr...

Encouragement of open, direct communication between members of a dyad may produce favorable or unfavorable results, depending upon the situation. The author presents a system of classifying communication barriers, designed to help the therapist decide when to encourage open communication and when to support the withholding of communication of certa...

Problems arise in marital relationships when any of the following conditions are not met: first, that the couple have correspondence of their beliefs, or rules, as to what behaviors constitute "value messages" or "devalue messages"; second, that they depend primarily upon nonpainful channels for sending and receiving value messages; and third, that...

One previous study reported that psychiatric inpatients on bedtime-only doses of tricyclic or neuroleptic drugs reported more frequent frightening dreams than did those on divided daily doses. As a further test of this hypothesis, and in order to see whether differences in frequency of frightening dreams were a function of differences in total drea...

One may not rely solely on serum lithium levels to detect or prevent lithium intoxication. A review of the reported cases of serious lithium intoxication despite "therapeutic" blood levels of lithium is presented, along with a discussion of possible explanations for the phenomenon. Possible alternate means of following a patient on lithium carbonat...

Four sources of motivation for first- and second-year medical students are desire for professional competence, intellectual satisfaction, success on tests, and the admiration of others. A review of some education literature and an attempt to select ways in which the above desires could be made to strengthen, rather than oppose, each other suggest t...

"En las Relaciones humanas que se produzcan enfrentamientos; el problema real es saber cómo afrontarlos, eligiendo el estilo de comunicación más adecuado para cada situación. Eso es precisamente lo que aquí se explica, con la ayuda de numerosos ejercicios que contribuyen a eliminar los malos hábitos desarrollados para responder a situaciones confli...