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The objective of this study is to evaluate the psychometrics and clinical efficiency of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC), which measures physical symptoms, harm avoidance, social anxiety, and separation/panic. Using a sample of 190 treatment-seeking Norwegian youth (aged 7-13 years, M[subscript age] = 10.3 years, 62.1% male), the internal stability and ability to predict to disorder were examined for child, mother, and father reports on the MASC. Moderate to strong internal reliability was exhibited across all MASC subscales. Parent-child agreement was low, but mother-father agreement was high. MASC scores successfully distinguished between children with and without anxiety disorders and identified youth with separation anxiety disorder and social phobia, but less accurately generalized anxiety disorders. The MASC has favorable psychometric properties and is a useful screening instrument for identifying youth with anxiety disorders. (Contains 6 tables and 3 footnotes.)

There exist a number of concepts and operational definitions of quality of life. In the present study the aim has been to develop a comprehensive, global index of quality of life, and relate the sub-indexes and global index to various socio-demographic variables, somatic health and density of population in the residential area. The sample consisted of 2066 individuals between 18 and 65 years old from the common population. Seven sub-indexes were developed. They constituted one factor with moderate intercorrelations between the sub-indexes. Good somatic health, living in a stable relationship with a partner, preferably married, in a less densely populated area, having a good education, a good income and being a younger female were the independent statistical determinants of global quality of life. However, various sub-indexes were related to different socio-demographic variables. Age was oppositely related to different sub-indexes. The study shows the importance of what type of quality of life is investigated. To our knowledge, this is the first study of the effect of population density on quality of life.

Depressive symptoms were measured in a cohort of community-based adolescents (n=163) at two time-points, with 1 year intervening. At Time 2, participants also answered a scale about past-year stressful life events. Depressive symptoms increased from Time 1 to Time 2, the effect being stronger for girls than for boys. Depressive symptoms were significantly correlated with concurrent measures of recent stressful life events, but this relationship disappeared after controlling for previous depressive symptoms. Rather, previous level of depressive symptoms predicted stressful life events. This demonstrates that a unidirectional model of stressful life events as the cause of depressive symptoms in adolescents is too simplistic.

The relevance of resilience research for clinical practice has not yet been established. In this intervention pilot study, the aim was to explore how group work based on enhancing the participants' creativity, self-efficacy, active coping, and sense of continuity could be utilized within a clinical context for adolescents with stressful background experiences. 31 participants and 24 parents completed pre-, post-, and 1-yr. follow-up assessments of the youths' behavior difficulties, as well as depression, positive life attitude, coping, and prosocial behavior. Apart from a drop in self-rated prosocial behavior, no significant treatment effects were found. Implications for clinical practice and research are indicated.

The associations of the MCMI-II symptom scales with dispositional coping strategies were studied among 239 psychiatric outpatients. A similar corepattern of emotion-focused coping was associated with all symptom scales except the bipolar scale. High scores on the MCMI-II symptom scales were associated with low use of adaptive emotion-focused coping (e.g., seeking social support) and high use of maladaptive emotion-focused coping (e.g., disengagement). Thought disorder, drug dependence, and delusional disorder also were associated with reduced use of problem-focused coping. The findings support the theoretical distinction between adaptive and maladaptive emotion-focused coping. The potential negative impacts of this coping pattern in terms of mental health and life adaptation are discussed.

The present follow-up study investigated the differential effects of dispositional coping styles on change in nine clinical syndromes of the Axis I spectrum of the DSM-III-R. Subjects were 155 psychiatric outpatients who were examined 6 and 7 years after their enrollment in the study. Coping accounted for up to 9% of the variance of symptom change over 1 year. As hypothesized, the effects of different coping styles varied considerably across the clinical syndromes. Active goal-oriented coping improved symptoms of the anxiety and the dependency spectrum; seeking social support had beneficial effects on symptoms of the depressive spectrum. The effects of the coping styles distraction, use of alcohol and other drugs, and focusing on and venting of emotions were detrimental, but again in a specific way. The results suggest that the differentiation of outcome criteria for coping is important.