Increasing Effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Conduct Problems in Children and Adolescents: What Can We Learn from Neuroimaging Studies?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is particularly relevant for children from 7 years on and adolescents with clinical levels of conduct problems. CBT provides these children and adolescents with anger regulation and social problem-solving skills that enable them to behave in more independent and situation appropriate ways. Typically, CBT is combined with another psychological treatment such as behavioral parent training in childhood or an intervention targeting multiple systems in adolescence. The effectiveness of CBT, however, is in the small to medium range. The aim of this review is to describe how the effectiveness of CBT may be improved by paying more attention to a series of psychological functions that have been shown to be impaired in neuroimaging studies: (1) anger recognition, (2) the ability to generate situation appropriate solutions to social problems, (3) reinforcement-based decision making, (4) response inhibition, and (5) affective empathy. It is suggested that children and adolescents first become familiar with these psychological functions during group CBT sessions. In individual sessions in which the parents (and/or child care workers in day treatment and residential treatment) and the child or adolescent participate, parents then learn to elicit, support, and reinforce their child’s use of these psychological functions in everyday life (in vivo practice). In these individual sessions, working on the psychological functions is tailored to the individual child’s characteristic impairments of these functions. CBT therapists may also share crucial social-learning topics with teachers with a view to creating learning opportunities for children and adolescents at school.