Michael W. Myers

An ecological approach to promoting early adolescent mental health and social adaptation: family-centered intervention in public middle schools.

This study examined the impact of the Family Check-Up (FCU) and linked intervention services on reducing health-risk behaviors and promoting social adaptation among middle school youth. A total of 593 students and their families were randomly assigned to receive either the intervention or middle school services as usual. Forty-two percent of intervention families engaged in the service and received the FCU. Using complier average causal effect analyses, engagement in the intervention moderated intervention outcomes. Families who engaged in the intervention had youth who reported lower rates of antisocial behavior and substance use over time than did a matched control sample. Results extend previous research indicating that a family-centered approach to supporting youth in the public school setting reduced the growth of antisocial behavior, alcohol use, tobacco use, and marijuana use throughout the middle school years.

Cascading peer dynamics underlying the progression from problem behavior to violence in early to late adolescence

This study examined the peer dynamics linking early adolescent problem behavior, school marginalization, and low academic performance to multiple indices of late adolescent violence (arrests, parent report, and youth report) in an ethnically diverse sample of 998 males and females. A cascade model was proposed in which early adolescent risk factors assessed at age 11 to 12 predict gang involvement at age 13 to 14, which in turn, predicts deviancy training with friends at age 16 to 17, which then predicts violence by age 18 to 19. Each construct in the model was assessed with multiple measures and methods. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cascade model fit the data well, with problem behavior, school marginalization, and low academic performance significantly predicting gang involvement 2 years later. Gang involvement, in turn, predicted deviancy training with a friend, which predicted violence. The best fitting model included an indirect and direct path between early adolescent gang involvement and later violence. These findings suggest the need to carefully consider peer clustering into gangs in efforts to prevent individual and aggregate levels of violence, especially in youths who may be disengaged, marginalized, or academically unsuccessful in the public school context.

Better Living Through Perspective Taking

People behave better – more acceptably, more admirably, more prosocially – after perspective taking. First, perspective taking has been consistently found to increase compassionate emotions (commonly called empathy, but the precise label in this case is “empathic concern”) toward the person whose perspective has been taken. Second, perspective taking leads people to view and treat other people more like the self, viewing them as possessing more traits in common with the self, and symbolically having “merged,” at least partially, with the self in terms of cognitive representations and descriptions of personality and explanations of behavior.