# Examining Therapeutic Change Mechanisms in an Affect Regulation, Father-Focused Intervention for Reducing Family Violence and Associated Symptoms in Children

> **NIH NIH R01** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $696,966

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV), often perpetrated by fathers, has been described as a
gateway to other adversity, with more than a 50% co-occurrence of direct forms of child maltreatment (CM).
IPV exposure can wreak havoc on children, with risk for psychosocial impairments, including posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), that can emerge early and cascade across development. Lacking are interventions
that adequately address the complex nature of IPV in families, including fatherhood and coparenting. This gap
reflects a bias towards excluding offending fathers from child-focused work and an overreliance on batterer
intervention programs (BIPs), which have shown negligible effects in meta-analyses and fail to address the
roots of offending behaviors in fathers. Consequently, IPV exposed children remain at risk and fathers’
personal and interpersonal functioning, including the father-child relationship, does not improve. In effect, there
is an urgent need for effective interventions for fathers and their families. Fathers for Change (F4C) is a novel
fatherhood-focused intervention with a dual focus on IPV and CM that focuses on identifying, understanding,
and managing emotions to reduce aggression and improve partner and parent-child interactions. F4C has a
growing evidence-base demonstrating significant reductions in family violence, improved father-child
interactions, and in one open trial, improved child mental health. Proposed therapeutic mechanisms of F4C
include reflective functioning (RF), the capacity for parents to understand their own and children’s actions as a
function of underlying states and motivations, and emotion regulation (ER), the capacity to exert control over
emotional states and reactions to threat. Poor RF and ER have been associated with increased family violence
and stress-related psychopathology, suggesting key focal points for intervention. To date, there have been no
empirical examinations of ER and RF as therapeutic change mechanisms for reducing family violence and
improving father-child interactions and child mental health. Proposed is a dual-site, multi-modal examination of
ER and RF in fathers (of children 4-7 y.o.) randomized to F4C (N=180) or the Duluth Model (N=180), a BIP
serving as active control. In-session observational coding will assess adaptive and maladaptive ER and RF
across treatment. Weekly self-ratings will assess at-home ER and RF. Aims will (1) assess efficacy of F4C
compared to a standard BIP in reducing family violence and child mental health impairment, (2) identify and
compare trajectories of therapeutic change targets across interventions, and (3) examine the mediating role of
father’s ER and RF on child-related outcomes. This proposal will grow the evidence-base for F4C and advance
our understanding of therapeutic mechanisms through which F4C exerts its effects.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10917280
- **Project number:** 5R01HD110583-02
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Damion Joseph Grasso
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $696,966
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-01 → 2028-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10917280

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10917280, Examining Therapeutic Change Mechanisms in an Affect Regulation, Father-Focused Intervention for Reducing Family Violence and Associated Symptoms in Children (5R01HD110583-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10917280. Licensed CC0.

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