Justice-involved individuals often struggle to access adequate mental healthcare, highlighting the need for new therapeutic approaches. Mobile health (mHealth) applications offer a promising solution,...

Parental factors have a profound implication on adolescents’ depressive symptoms. Parents’ adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) shape their parenting, thus predicting the next generation’s mental heal...

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology brings together current and innovative research that advances knowledge of psychopathology from infancy ...

Parental factors have a profound implication on adolescents’ depressive symptoms. Parents’ adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) shape their parenting, thus predicting the next generation’s mental heal...

Adolescence is a critical developmental stage in which family dynamics strongly influence behaviors such as binge drinking and emotional regulation. This study examined whether future orientation medi...

Caregivers of detained adolescents often face significant stress and barriers to accessing resources needed to support their adolescents during community re-entry. This mixed-methods study used a participatory co-design approach to develop and pilot test a mobile health intervention aimed at reducing parenting stress among caregivers of detained adolescents with behavioral health needs. Eleven caregivers participated across two phases: co-design of the intervention (n = 6) and an open trial (n = 5). Co-design sessions engaged caregivers as equal partners to create an intervention (RAISE) tailored to their needs, incorporating mindfulness-based stress reduction, resources for navigating the juvenile legal system, and tools for improving family communication. Quantitative findings indicated high levels of caregiver engagement with the co-design process, with increased confidence in contributing to mobile app development and strong perceptions of the intervention’s relevance. Qualitative thematic analysis highlighted caregiver priorities for intervention, including stress-management strategies, culturally relevant content, and mechanisms for community connection. Caregivers valued being recognized as integral collaborators and emphasized the importance of addressing structural barriers, such as stigma and systemic racism, within the app. The final RAISE app integrates evidence-based practices with user-driven features, offering a culturally relevant and accessible tool to support caregivers. Despite limitations, including a small sample size and technical challenges during the open trial, the study demonstrates the feasibility of participatory methods to address the unique needs of caregivers of detained adolescents. Future research will evaluate the efficacy of RAISE in reducing stress and improving outcomes for families of detained youth.Clinicaltrials.gov registration NCT05032742.

The risk of child emotional and conduct problems elevates in the context of food insecurity. However, it is unclear whether these relationships could vary when considering the fact that food insecurity may change by time. Addressing this research gap can help clarify which specific patterns of food insecurity over time present the highest risk to children’s emotional and behavioral well-being, an important step forward to informing prevention efforts. Utilizing data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Main Study and Child Development Supplement, this study examines the associations between food insecurity trajectories and child emotional and conduct problems using negative binomial regression models applied with Growth Mixture Modeling. For causal inference, this study applies generalized propensity score weight. The results reveal that long-term food security is predictive of lowest risk of children’s emotional and conduct problems. This study also reveals that a high initial level of food insecurity is associated with higher risk of children’s emotional and conduct problems, even if such food insecurity improves across time. Moreover, their risk of developing emotional and conduct problems is as high as children who experience worsening food insecurity across time. These findings suggest that sustained food security acts as a protective factor for children’s emotional and behavioral health. For children facing food insecurity, early intervention and efforts to prevent further deterioration are both important to lower the risk of children’s emotional and conduct problems.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obesity are both independently associated with emotion dysregulation, including low frustration tolerance. There is a lack of research examining shared and unique aspects of emotion dysregulation in relation to ADHD and obesity separately and when they co-occur. This study examined emotion dysregulation as assessed with questionnaires and tasks involving frustrative non-reward in children with and without ADHD with varying body mass index (BMI). Participants included 163 8–17 year-olds with varying levels of ADHD symptoms and BMI. Emotion regulation was assessed through parent- and youth-report questionnaires of trait-based emotion regulation, lability/negativity, and irritability. In addition, youth-report state-based measures of frustration were obtained pre- and post-frustrative non-reward tasks assessing cognitive control and task persistence. On trait measures, higher ADHD symptoms were associated with less emotion regulation and more irritability and lability/negativity, regardless of BMI. On state measures, ADHD symptoms tended to be positively associated with increased frustration and less persistence during a frustrating task, but these effects were not significant. Our results suggest that emotion dysregulation, as assessed in this study, may be largely specific to ADHD. Larger studies including children with stringent ADHD diagnostic classification and objective measures of body fat and eating behavior are warranted to advance our understanding of the role of emotion dysregulation in pediatric ADHD and overweight/obesity.

Cannabis use is common among US youth who become involved in the juvenile legal system (JLS), yet substance use treatment rates remain low, particularly among youth diverted away from formal JLS involvement. Diverted youth encounter multiple barriers to receiving services in the community that could be addressed via digital approaches offered by the JLS. This multiphase work details development of the TECH (Teen Empowerment through Computerized Health) app, a tailored digital adjunct to usual JLS services. First, qualitative interviews with diverted youth (n = 14) aged 14–18 years and their caregivers (n = 8) established youths’ cannabis-related treatment needs and preferences; youth were asked to specifically consider several theory-driven app components (personalization, behavior change, social interaction, gamification, and motivation enhancement). After building the TECH app, 10 diverted youth beta-tested the prototype over one month, to inform its preliminary feasibility (i.e., participation and app metadata) and acceptability (i.e., app quality and user satisfaction). Qualitative results indicated diverted youth and caregivers were open to an app to reduce cannabis use. Interviewed youth were divided about theoretically driven features, likely due to their unique preferences and needs. Prototype beta testing demonstrated diverted youth were willing to engage; metadata indicated all beta-testers used TECH independently after their baseline appointment, demonstrating feasibility. Participants rated satisfaction as slightly above average, reporting the app was of good quality and recommending ways to increase acceptability. We discuss implications of these preliminary findings on the app itself and the broader field of digital health for youth diverted from the JLS.

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by heightened emotionality. Past research indicated that the biased interpretation of social situations (i.e., interpretation bias) might contribute to these aberrant affect dynamics in adolescents’ daily life. Social situations are, however, constantly changing. Therefore, the ability to flexibly revise social interpretations (i.e., interpretation flexibility) might be equally important as interpretation biases for explaining affective outcomes during adolescence. The present study examined whether interpretation bias and inflexibility predicted two major affect dynamics features (i.e., mean and standard deviation) in children and adolescents. At baseline, N = 154 children and adolescents (M = 12.81 years; 48.70% female; 49.35% male; 1.95% non-binary; 72.08% White) completed a task assessing bias and inflexibility in interpreting social situations. Then, for 28 days, participants rated their positive and negative affect. Results showed that inflexibility in revising positive and negative interpretations in light of disconfirming evidence predicted higher intensity of negative affect. When controlling for interpretation inflexibility, positive interpretation bias predicted higher positive affect, whereas negative interpretation bias was associated with more variable negative affect. The results emphasize the predictive utility of interpretation biases and inflexibility for daily affective experiences in youths.

Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs), encompassing both nonsuicidal self-injury and suicidality, are a growing public health concern in youth. Although maternal depression is a well-establish...

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology brings together current and innovative research that advances knowledge of psychopathology from infancy ...

Callous-unemotional (CU), daring-impulsive (DI), and grandiose-manipulative (GM) specifiers are considered informative for the treatment of youth with conduct disorder (CD), but empirical evidence is ...

Exploring psychiatric antecedents in youths at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis (CHR-P) could help understand determinants for early detection and timely care pathways, consequently improving outcomes...

The present study was embedded in an Asian birth cohort to (a) investigate the trajectories of specific anxiety subtypes from middle childhood to early adolescence, (b) compare developmental trajector...

As the prevalence of Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD) in late adolescence increases, understanding the etiology of CUD is paramount. Consistent with resilience frameworks, the current study examined whethe...

Research examining the link between emotion dysregulation and youth social impairments has focused almost exclusively on the dysregulation of negative emotions. Yet some youth experience dysregulation...

Life history framework underscores the importance of time perspective in studies on dark personality development and its outcomes. This study aims to examine the potential role of future negative insi...

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology brings together current and innovative research that advances knowledge of psychopathology from infancy ...

This study examined changes in the agreement, stability, and validity of parent and self-reports of a commonly used measure of youth depression symptoms, the Children’s Depression Inventory, from chil...

Research on Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) has predominantly focused on adulthood, with limited attention to children. However, examining IU during childhood is clinically important, as it can shed l...

Childhood social withdrawal is linked to increased risk of depression and peer difficulties. While data suggest that some child temperaments are more likely to be socially withdrawn, empirical data in...

To improve assessment in forensic youth care, a virtual reality (VR) task was developed to assess behavior without the limitations associated with traditional self-report instruments. The aim of the c...

The codevelopment of positive and negative coping styles and adolescent depression and their relationships at both the between-person and within-person levels remain poorly understood, particularly am...