Research Library

This paper reviews and summarizes the research on parental mentalizing using the Parent Development Interview and the Reflective Functioning coding. It also describes the future developments for the measure.

Brief review of the neuroscientific findings that illuminate whether and how adverse early caregiving experiences impact on brain development and poor socioemotional outcomes in children in care, and how such evidence informs our understanding of attachment outcomes in this population.

Despite recent investments in school-based mental health and wellbeing promotion in England, the sustainability of mental health interventions remains a substantial challenge. This article brings together potential solutions to sustaining interventions in schools, drawing on insights from an online roundtable discussion held in July 2022. 

We searched for studies investigating whole-family-interventions for families living with parental mental illness. We identified what these interventions have in common, their effectiveness and how families' experienced them.

Level Up is a novel, UK-based intervention consisting of five online group sessions, straddling the summer holidays, and providing at-risk children and their parents/carers with skills to manage their behaviour, emotions, and relationships to support their transition to secondary school. A prior evaluation of Level Up reported a need to better describe the mechanisms of change. This study therefore evaluated the experiences of children and their parents/carers regarding the facilitators and barriers to engagement and change, and the perceived impact.

When given identical information, mental health professionals were less likely to diagnose a child in care (vs. a child not in care) with PTSD. Related to this lesser detection of PTSD, mental health professionals were also less likely to choose NICE-recommended PTSD treatments for a child in care.

We found evidence of poorer cognitive control for young people in care compared to their peers, however this was not worsened in affective contexts. Contrary to hypotheses, this deficit was not related to emotion regulation, mental health difficulties, or school well-being for young people in care.

This study investigated if oxytocin nasal administration reduces low mood in new mothers with postnatal depression.

This narrative review synthesizes empirical evidence on epistemic trust to inform future research. A literature search highlighted 3 areas: i) the development of selective trust in children; ii) epistemic trust in non-clinical adults; iii) its link to mental health.