Parent Expectancies and Preferences for Mental Health Treatment: The Roles of Emotion Mind-Sets and Views of Failure

Abstract

Because parents are primary gatekeepers to mental health care for their children, parental expectations that mental health treatment is ineffective may undermine treatment seeking, retention, and response. Thus, a need exists to understand parents’ expectations about treatment and to develop scalable interventions that can instill more favorable views. We examined parents’ treatment expectancies and preferences for their offspring and themselves in relation to two global beliefs: mind-sets (malleability beliefs) of emotions and anxiety, and views of failure as enhancing versus debilitating. Study 1 (N = 200; 49.5% fathers; 70.4% Caucasian) examined associations among parents’ emotion mind-sets, anxiety mind-sets, failure beliefs, and treatment expectancies and preferences. Study 2 (N = 430; 44.70% fathers; 75.80% Caucasian) tested whether online inductions teaching “growth emotion mind-sets” (viewing emotions as malleable), adaptive failure beliefs, or both improved parents’ treatment expectancies and hypothetical preferences for treatment (vs. no-treatment). Participants received one of three 8- to 15-min inductions or a psychoeducation control, rating treatment expectancies. and preferences pre- and postinduction. In Study 1, fixed emotion mind-sets and failure-is-debilitating beliefs were associated with lower parent psychotherapy expectancies for offspring and themselves and stronger “no-treatment” preferences for offspring. In Study 2, inductions teaching (a) growth emotion mind-sets only and (b) growth emotion mind-sets and failure-is-enhancing beliefs improved parents’ psychotherapy expectancies for themselves (ds = .38, .51) and offspring (ds = .30, .43). No induction increased parents’ hypothetical preferences for treatment (vs. no-treatment). Findings suggest scalable strategies for strengthening parents’ psychotherapy effectiveness beliefs for themselves and their children.

Notes

¹ MTurk is a popular method for recruiting and collecting survey, experimental, and intervention data online (Paolacci & Chandler, 2014). Using MTurk, “requesters” (including researchers) can recruit “workers” (individuals with an MTurk account) to complete HITs, such as completing surveys or summarizing articles. Requesters pay eligible workers upon submission of HITs they choose to complete. MTurk is used for data collection by researchers from widely varying fields, such as linguistics, behavioral economics, and clinical psychology (Chandler & Shapiro, 2016). Previous work suggests that MTurk samples are more diverse and representative of the population as compared to college student samples and community samples collected near college towns, across many demographic dimensions (e.g., gender, age, race/ethnicity, employment status, number of children; Berinsky, Huber, & Lenz, 2012).

² Results did not differ when parent and child mental health problems (BSI, SDQ) were included as covariates.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Harvard University Department of Psychology William H. Talley Fund.