Testing an Interactive Model of Symptom Severity in Conduct Disordered Youth

Abstract

This study presents data from 85 young offenders referred for court-ordered mental health assessments. A model of interactive risk was tested, in which parent-child relationships, social-contextual adversity, and antisocial thinking were predicted to be associated with aggressive and delinquent behavior in a multiplicative fashion. For aggression, strong associations were found with parent-adolescent alienation, but there were no interactions with social-contextual risk or antisocial thinking. For delinquency, parent-adolescent relationship quality interacted with both social-contextual risk and antisocial thinking. Better parent-adolescent trust-communication was associated with an attenuated effect of social-contextual risk and antisocial thinking on delinquency. Greater parent-adolescent alienation, however, was associated with relatively high levels of delinquent behavior irrespective of social-contextual risk, whereas adolescents reporting less attachment-alienation showed greater delinquency as social-contextual risk increased.