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Intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a global public health issue. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the highest risk factor and predictor of IPH. The emotional and psychological distress from IPV often leads clients to seek counseling services. As a result, counselors interact with individuals experiencing IPV who are at risk of IPH. The counseling literature is replete with IPV counseling interventions and discussion, but scant attention has been paid to IPH in counseling journals. Increasing discussion of IPH in the counseling literature helps counselors gain insight into preventative measures and interventions, such as assessing risk, expanding resource accessibility, and developing a safety plan to better ensure client safety. This article examines IPH literature, IPH vulnerabilities and risk factors, prevention efforts, and recommendations for counselors, such as assessing IPH risk, providing referrals to community resources, and developing safety plans.

This paper describes a theoretical model of Mindful Coping Power, a preventive intervention targeting high-risk children and their parents. Mindful Coping Power integrated mindfulness into Coping Power, an evidence-based cognitive behavioral intervention. Reactive aggression is emotionally driven, impulsive, and often referred to as being "hot-blooded." It has been resistant to change, given the high level of emotional arousal and impulsive angry outbursts. Our premise is that mindfulness impacts the mechanisms of reactive aggression-attentional, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional dysregulation. Also in the model are parents who exhibit emotionally charged interactions with their child. Mindful parenting focuses on parents' own emotional self-regulation and being fully present with their child. Our model sets the stage for incorporating mindfulness into existing interventions, thereby optimizing programs and maximizing effects.

Universal prevention approaches have significantly reduced children's conduct problems and aggressive behavior in the school setting, but it has not been clear whether the effects generalize into children's behavior in home and community settings in later elementary school years. The present study examined this issue using a classroom-randomized design, with 1030 students in 70 fourth and fifth grade Italian classes. The intervention model is the Coping Power Universal and the classroom teachers delivered it. Coping Power Universal produced a significant reduction in both parents' and teachers' rated conduct problems, relative to control classes, indicating that universal prevention can produce significant reductions in children's conduct problems that generalize into the home and community settings. The intervention also increased children's prosocial behaviors in school and home settings. The Coping Power Universal is a short intervention model that is believed to be a useful strategy for children's behavioral problems in the broad population.

Coping Power (CP) is an evidence-based preventive intervention for youth with disruptive behavior problems. This study examined whether Mindful Coping Power (MCP), a novel adaptation which integrates mindfulness into CP, enhances program effects on children’s reactive aggression and self-regulation. A pilot randomized design was utilized to estimate the effect sizes for MCP versus CP in a sample of 102 child participants (fifth grade students, predominantly low-middle income, 87% Black). MCP produced significantly greater improvement in children’s self-reported dysregulation (emotional, behavioral, cognitive) than CP, including children’s perceived anger modulation. Small to moderate effects favoring MCP were also observed for improvements in child-reported inhibitory control and breath awareness and parent-reported child attentional capacity and social skills. MCP did not yield a differential effect on teacher-rated reactive aggression. CP produced a stronger effect than MCP on parent-reported externalizing behavior problems. Although MCP did not enhance program effects on children’s reactive aggression as expected, it did have enhancing effects on children’s internal, embodied experiences (self-regulation, anger modulation, breath awareness). Future studies are needed to compare MCP and CP in a large scale, controlled efficacy trial and to examine whether MCP-produced improvements in children’s internal experiences lead to improvements in their observable behavior over time.

This study examined whether pre-disaster indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity moderated the relation between degree of disaster exposure from an EF-4 tornado and changes in the externalizing and internalizing behavior problems of children at-risk for aggression. Participants included 188 children in 4th-6th grades (65% male; 78% African American; ages 9–13) and their parents from predominantly low-income households who were participating in a prevention study when the tornado occurred in 2011. Fourth-grade children who exhibited elevated levels of aggressive behavior were recruited in three annual cohorts. Parent-rated externalizing and internalizing problems were assessed prior to the tornado (Wave 1; W1), and at 4–12 months (W2), 16–24 months (W3), 42–28 months (W4) and 56–60 months (W5) post-tornado. Children’s pre-tornado Skin Conductance Level (SCL) reactivity and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) withdrawal were assessed at W1 using SCL and RSA measured during resting baseline and during the first 5 minutes of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and parents reported their exposure to tornado-related trauma and disruptions at Wave 3. Children displayed less reduction in externalizing problems if there had been higher child- or parent-reported tornado exposure and less RSA withdrawal, or if they had lower parent-reported TORTE and less SCL reactivity or lower SCL baseline. Highlighting the importance of children’s pre-disaster arousal, higher levels of disaster exposure negatively affected children’s level of improvement in externalizing problems when children had less vagal withdrawal, and when tornado exposure disrupted the protective effects of higher SCL reactivity and higher SCL baseline.

The primary goal of rehabilitation counseling services is to holistically enhance quality of life (QOL) of persons with disabilities. However, the spiritual dimension of QOL may be the area least attended to by both rehabilitation counselors and counselor educators. It is imperative to raise attention to and understanding of this dimension and specifically its main indicator—spiritual well-being (SWB). In response, the authors of this study reviewed and examined 15 SWB scales regarding scale domains, item generation, selected sample, scaling approaches, as well as psychometric properties (i.e., reliability and validity). The results raised various issues that should be considered by professionals in rehabilitation counseling when studying SWB and its measurement. Implications were provided with regard to research, practice, and teaching on the topic of SWB in rehabilitation counseling.

Coping Power is an evidence-based preventive intervention for youth with aggressive behavior problems that has traditionally been delivered in small group formats, but because of concerns about potentially diminished effects secondary to aggregation of high risk youth, an individual format of Coping Power has been developed. The current study examined whether physiological characteristics of the child may provide information about which intervention delivery format works best for that individual. Indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system functioning were examined in 360 fourth-grade children (65% male; 76.4% self-reported African-American) who were randomly assigned to Group Coping Power (GCP) or Individual Coping Power (ICP) (Lochman et al., 2015). Longitudinal assessments of teacher- and parent-reported proactive and reactive aggression were collected through a one-year follow-up. For children with higher initial levels of aggression, those with lower parasympathetic functioning at pre-intervention showed greater reductions in teacher-rated proactive aggression in the ICP condition than the GCP condition. For children with high parasympathetic functioning, there was no differential effect of intervention format. Regardless of intervention format, youth with lower levels of sympathetic functioning at pre-intervention demonstrated greater reductions in teacher-rated proactive aggression. These findings suggest that physiological indicators may be worth considering in future studies examining which youth respond best to specific types of interventions.

This study explored the change in viewers’ explicit and implicit attitudes toward people with disabilities (PWDs) after they watched person-centered videos, which focused on real-life experiences of PWDs and/or their perspectives toward disability. Fifty-three undergraduate students were randomly assigned to two groups. In the control group, participants had their explicit and implicit attitudes measured before and after three body-scan sessions. In the experimental group, participants took the same tests before and after watching three videos. The results showed that participants’ explicit attitudes became more positive, and implicit attitudes became more negative in the experimental group, while there was no change in attitudes in the control group. These results have unique implications for using person-centered videos to change attitudes toward PWDs in undergraduate education and rehabilitation counseling education. Suggestions for future research are provided.

Disruptive behavior disorders can be highly impairing to children and families and costly to society. Thus, effective treatment and prevention strategies for disruptive behavior disorders are critically important. This chapter describes cognitive therapy approaches to improve anger management in children with, or at risk for, disruptive behavior disorders. Empirically based components of cognitive therapies for correcting interpersonal perceptions and planning effective responses are explicated, using the Coping Power program as an exemplar. Applied examples are provided to illustrate how to use treatments like Coping Power in practice. Other efficacious prevention and treatment programs that include cognitive components are described and contrasted. Outcomes of these programs are summarized, as well as the generalizability of their effects. Finally, future directions in the development and dissemination of cognitive therapies to improve anger management in children with, or at risk for, disruptive behavior disorders are summarized.