Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Widely used treatment programs for children with behavioural problems include parent and child components to improve problem solving and emotion regulation skills. However, these programs are not effective for a significant number of children. This study will identify child-specific factors that contribute to diminished treatment effects and pilot a promising treatment in order to better intervene with these factors to improve outcomes. Empathy is a prosocial emotion that is associated with healthy childhood social development. However, children who have problems understanding and expressing empathy tend to show more persistent and severe behaviour problems compared to their peers. They are also particularly difficult to treat. Working with parents to help children develop empathy may be an effective route to reducing children's aggression and improving their social behaviour. For example, research demonstrates that when a parent shows more warmth, their child has fewer problems expressing empathy. As such, intervening to help parents teach empathy skills by facilitating parental warmth is a promising avenue for intervention. The objective of this study is to understand how parenting with warmth affects children's expressions of empathy and behaviour problems over the course of treatment. The first part will look at these relationships in an ongoing treatment trial for children with behaviour problems aged 6-12 years. The second part will recruit a sample of children with low empathy skills who do not show sufficient response to the original treatment. These children will be randomly assigned to either receive the additional treatment or to a wait-list condition (whereby they receive the treatment after 8 weeks). This project will provide important information on child factors that contribute to the severity of children's behaviour difficulties and that interfere with their treatment response; this will identify new avenues to improving treatment outcomes.