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Introduction: Quality assessment from the patient's point of view makes it possible to identify negative quality developments at an early stage. The focus is not on the medical result, but on what the patient wants. Correlations between patient satisfaction and physical and psychological treatment outcome were already shown in the 1990s. However, studies using rather unspecific satisfaction measures are scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of patient satisfaction with the treatment and the therapies offered on the extent of recovery., Methods: In this prospective study, a questionnaire developed for the differentiated recording of patient satisfaction with the therapy offerings of the LWL-Klinik Dortmund was used in a day-care/hospital setting. The structure of the questionnaire was tested by means of explorative factor analysis. The factors generated in this way served as the basis for the hierarchical regression analyses in the further course. In addition to important treatment aspects from the patient's point of view, the subjective health status was recorded by means of SF-36., Results: 105 patients participated in the study (64% female, 84% diagnosed with depression). Significant predictors for physical health were well-being after exercise therapy and satisfaction with the weekly structure of services. Significant predictors for mental health were age at onset of illness, age, perceived benefits from exercise therapy as well as occupational therapy, treatment duration and setting., Discussion: The demonstrated impact of patient satisfaction on mental health highlights the relevance of treatment quality improvement to recovery., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier GmbH.)

Reduced responsiveness to emotions is hypothesized to contribute to the development of conduct disorder (CD) in children and adolescents. Accordingly, blunted psychophysiological responses to emotions have been observed in boys with CD, but this has never been tested in girls. Therefore, this study compared psychophysiological responses to sadness in girls and boys with and without CD, and different clinical phenotypes of CD: with versus without limited prosocial emotions (LPE), and with versus without comorbid internalizing disorders (INT). Nine-hundred and 27 girls (427 CD, 500 controls) and 519 boys (266 CD, 253 controls) aged 9-18 years participated. Psychophysiological responses were measured while participants watched two validated sad film clips, specifically: heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; indexing parasympathetic activity), preejection period (PEP; indexing sympathetic activity). Girls and boys with CD showed larger HR responses to sadness than controls. This effect was rendered nonsignificant, however, after controlling for covariates. We observed aberrant RSA responses to sadness in CD compared with controls. Similarly, we found a significant positive association between RSA responsivity and antisocial behavior when assessed dimensionally. The effects were very small, though. Results were similar for boys and girls. We found no evidence for emotional underresponsiveness in CD in the largest psychophysiological study to date in this field. More research is needed to explore whether this is specific to sadness or generalizes to other emotions. Furthermore, we recommend that studies on emotion processing in CD assess different physiological measures to help disentangle CD-related effects on sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Less is known about the relationship between conduct disorder (CD), callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and positive and negative parenting in youth compared to early childhood. We combined traditional univariate analyses with a novel machine learning classifier (Angle-based Generalized Matrix Learning Vector Quantization) to classify youth (N = 756; 9-18 years) into typically developing (TD) or CD groups with or without elevated CU traits (CD/HCU, CD/LCU, respectively) using youth- and parent-reports of parenting behavior. At the group level, both CD/HCU and CD/LCU were associated with high negative and low positive parenting relative to TD. However, only positive parenting differed between the CD/HCU and CD/LCU groups. In classification analyses, performance was best when distinguishing CD/HCU from TD groups and poorest when distinguishing CD/HCU from CD/LCU groups. Positive and negative parenting were both relevant when distinguishing CD/HCU from TD, negative parenting was most relevant when distinguishing between CD/LCU and TD, and positive parenting was most relevant when distinguishing CD/HCU from CD/LCU groups. These findings suggest that while positive parenting distinguishes between CD/HCU and CD/LCU, negative parenting is associated with both CD subtypes. These results highlight the importance of considering multiple parenting behaviors in CD with varying levels of CU traits in late childhood/adolescence.