Unfamiliar Untrained Observers’ Ratings of Adolescent Safety Behaviors Within Social Interactions with Unfamiliar Peer Confederates

Adolescents experiencing social anxiety often engage in safety behaviors―covert avoidance strategies for managing distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact)―that factor into the development and maintenance of their concerns. Prior work supports the psychometric properties of the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination (SAFE), a self-report survey of safety behaviors. Yet, we need complementary methods for assessing these behaviors within contexts where adolescents often experience concerns, namely, interactions with unfamiliar peers. Recent work indicates that, based on short, direct social interactions with adolescents, individuals posing as unfamiliar peers (i.e., peer confederates) and without assessment training can capably report about adolescent social anxiety. We built on prior work by testing whether we could gather valid SAFE reports from unfamiliar untrained observers (UUOs), who observed adolescents within archived recordings of these short social interactions. A mixed clinical/community sample of 105 adolescents self-reported on their functioning and participated in a series of social interaction tasks with peer confederates, who also provided social anxiety reports about the adolescent. Based on video recordings of these tasks, trained independent observers rated adolescents’ observed social skills, and an additional set of UUOs completed SAFE reports of these same adolescents. Unfamiliar untrained observers’ SAFE reports (a) related to adolescents’ SAFE self-reports, (b) distinguished adolescents on clinically elevated social anxiety concerns, (c) related to trained independent observers’ ratings of adolescent social skills within interactions with peer confederates, and (d) related to adolescents’ self-reported arousal within these same interactions. Our findings support use of unfamiliar observers’ perspectives to understand socially anxious adolescents’ interpersonal functioning.     

Mood-congruent biases in facial emotion perception and their gender dependence

Due to mood-congruency effects, we expect the emotion perceived on a face to be biased towards one's own mood. But the findings in the scant literature on such mood effects in normal healthy populations have not consistently and adequately supported this expectation. Employing effective mood manipulation techniques that ensured that the intended mood was sustained throughout the perception task, we explored mood-congruent intensity and recognition accuracy biases in emotion perception. Using realistic face stimuli with expressive cues of happiness and sadness, we demonstrated that happy, neutral and ambiguous expressions were perceived more positively in the positive than in the negative mood. The mood-congruency effect decreased with the degree of perceived negativity in the expression. Also, males were more affected by the mood-congruency effect in intensity perception than females. We suggest that the greater salience and better processing of negative stimuli and the superior cognitive ability of females in emotion perception are responsible for these observations. We found no evidence for mood-congruency effect in the recognition accuracy of emotions and suggest with supporting evidence that past reports of this effect may be attributed to response bias driven by mood.     

Coping and Mental Health in Early Adolescence during COVID-19

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - The current longitudinal study examines changes in overall mental health symptomatology from before to after the COVID-19 outbreak in youth from...     

Correction to: Suicidal Mental Imagery in Psychiatrically Hospitalized Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00827-8     

Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of Catholic Health Care Research: 1973–2019

Journal of Religion and Health - A multi-dimensional construct of Catholic health care is examined using a bibliometric analysis of 181 scientific studies from the Web of Science database. Medical...     

An Intersectional Approach to the Glass Ceiling: Gender,Race and Share of Middle and Senior Management in U.S. Workplaces

A robust body of research examines factors affecting the likelihood that women experience increasing barriers to promotion in workplaces. However, limited research examines how racialized and gendered processes may intersect and work differently for racially and gender marginalized workers. Specifically, the processes relating to a worker’s ability to reach middle-level management positions (e.g., those managers who oversee a small group of employees) and senior-level management positions (e.g., CEOs and other executive positions) may vary based on workers’ race and gender. Using 2015 EEO-1 data collected by the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), we examine how the characteristics of a workplace affect Black men, Black women, White men, and White women’s share of middle- and senior-level management. We find Black women and Black men are strikingly under-represented in both middle and senior management in private-sector workplaces. Our results demonstrate that access to middle- and senior-management varies by the characteristics of the workplace and workers’ race and gender. Overall, our findings point to an important implication: Greater oversight of workplaces, including by the EEOC, is associated with marginalized race/gender groups having higher shares of management.

     

Valuing the Spiritual

Journal of Religion and Health - Identifying reforms that minimize US healthcare costs is imperative. This commentary explores one intervention with potential cost-saving implications that has...     

Examining Temporal Cognition in Preschoolers With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Insights From Parent–Child Interactions

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Increasing evidence supports the existence of time-related impairments in school-aged children and adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),...     

Development and Implementation of a Transdiagnostic,Stepped-Care Approach to Treating Emotional Disorders in Children via Telehealth

Stepped-care interventions may increase the accessibility of evidence-based treatments but remain relatively underexplored in the child mental health literature. Further, while the feasibility and efficacy of stepped-care interventions have been examined for specific diagnoses or classes or disorders, transdiagnostic stepped-care interventions have not yet been developed. We discuss the development and initial implementation of a transdiagnostic approach to emotional disorders using the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Children (UP-C; Ehrenreich-May et al., 2018). A case series is presented to illustrate the delivery of UP-C stepped care (UPC-SC) via telehealth, using a collaborative decision-making process to inform step-up/step-down decisions. Lessons learned are discussed to guide refinements of UPC-SC and inform a larger trial.