Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Latinx children, youth, and families in the United States have been disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic compared to non-Latinxs, experiencing a higher burden of deaths, economic adversity, parental stress, and mental health problems. At the same time, Latinx children, youth, and families in the United States have rich cultural and community resources that serve as a source of protection and promotion. To our knowledge, no special issue has been devoted to the impact of the pandemic on Latinx children, youth, and families, which limits opportunities to examine its implications for clinical theory, research, assessment, policy, and practice...

A growing body of evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionally affected Latinx children, youth, and families in the United States by increasing the prevalence and incidence of mental health problems. While it is important to document the repercussions of the pandemic, it is also necessary to articulate what a future of wellbeing and positive mental health will look like for Latinx children, youth, and families. To address this need, we propose PARQUES, a framework to dream about the future of Latinx children, youth, and families in the United States...

OBJECTIVE: Sexual and gender minority (SGM) stigmatization is a key factor related to transgender adolescent mental health. While previous research has focused on direct associations between stigmatization and mental health, the present study of transgender youth, equitably recruited across the autism spectrum, examines cognitive and developmental factors in relation to the self-report of experienced and perceived SGM stigmatization. METHOD: 65 binary transgender adolescents (43% transfeminine; ages 13-21 years) were intentionally recruited across the spectrum of autism traits from no traits to full criteria autism...

OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the effects of treatment compliance with the Challenging Horizons Program (CHP) for high school aged adolescents with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHOD: Participants were 185 high school aged adolescents (65% non-Hispanic White; 79% male) with a diagnosis of ADHD who were randomly assigned to either CHP or community control. Outcomes included parent-rated academic functioning, parent- and self-rated social-emotional functioning, and GPA...

Studies of the genetic and environmental factors that make children more or less likely to develop distressing and impairing psychological problems, and studies of the psychobiological pathways through which these causal factors operate, have the goal of improving our understanding of the basic nature of psychological problems to develop better methods of prevention and treatment. For this reason, we have long had our eye on the prize of discovering the causes and psychobiological mechanisms underlying each dimension of psychological problems...

OBJECTIVE: Irritability symptoms are closely associated with, and may reflect, temperament traits, particularly negative affectivity (NA). However, there are few empirical data on the relationships between child temperament and irritability symptoms. METHOD: We investigated cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between irritability symptoms and temperament traits from age 3-15 in a community sample of 609 children and their parents. Irritability symptoms were assessed through structured interviews with parents at ages 3/6, and inventories completed by parents and youth at ages 12/15...

PURPOSE: Psychosocial and bioregulatory pressures threaten sleep during adolescence. Although recent work suggests that the ubiquity of smartphone use throughout adolescence may also relate to poorer sleep outcomes, most existing research relies upon self-report and retrospective measures. This study drew upon objective measures of smartphone use and sleep at the hourly level to understand how smartphone use was associated with the duration of wake events during sleeping hours. METHODS: Across a 14-day daily study, 59 racially and ethnically diverse adolescents ages 15 to 18 had their sleep assessed via Fitbit Inspire 2 devices and uploaded screenshots of their screen time, pickups, and notifications as logged by their iPhone's iOS...

OBJECTIVE: Research on the role of affect in childhood aggression motives has largely focused on domain-level affective traits. Lower-order affective facets may show more distinct relationships with instrumental and reactive aggression - at both the variable and individual levels - and offer unique insights into whether and how several forms of affect are involved in aggression motives. METHOD: Caregivers (98% mothers) of 342 children ( M age  = 9...

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the association between youth post-disaster stress responses and co-rumination in conversations with a parent several years after a devastating tornado. METHOD: Adolescents ( N  = 200) drawn from an ongoing study for aggressive youth (ages 13 to 17; 80% African American) and their parents experienced an EF-4 tornado in 2011 and then provided joint recollections about their tornado experiences approximately 5 years later...

OBJECTIVE: This study tested predicted bidirectional associations between irritability and physical and relational forms of aggression, disentangling theorized within- and between-person effects using latent curve models with structured residuals (LCM-SR) over one year in middle childhood. Gender differences and robustness of results when controlling for other externalizing problems (i.e., attention problems, delinquency) were also considered. METHOD: Children in third, fourth, and fifth grade ( N  = 704, 49...

OBJECTIVE: Sleep is crucial to overall health, playing a complex role in a wide range of mental health concerns in children and adults. Nevertheless, clinicians may not routinely assess sleep problems due to lack of awareness or limitations such as cost or time. Scoring sleep-related items embedded on broader scales may help clinicians get more out of tools they are already using. The current study explores evidence of reliability, validity, and clinical utility of sleep-related items embedded on two caregiver-report tools: the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Parent General Behavior Inventory (P-GBI)...

OBJECTIVE: The coronavirus pandemic drastically increased social isolation. Autistic youth already experience elevated social isolation and loneliness, making them highly vulnerable to the impact of the pandemic. We examined trajectories of social disruption and loneliness in autistic and non-autistic youth during a six-month period of the pandemic (June 2020 until November 2020). METHOD: Participants were 76 youth, ages 8 through 17, (Mage  = 12.82, Nautistic  = 51) with an IQ ≥ 70...

OBJECTIVE: Effectiveness trials aim to increase the generalizability and public health impact of interventions. However, challenges associated with this design present threats to external and internal validity. This paper illustrates these challenges using data from a two-site randomized effectiveness trial, the Community Study of Outcome Monitoring for Emotional Disorders in Teens (COMET) and presents recommendations for future research. METHOD: COMET was a randomized effectiveness trial conducted in 19 community mental health clinics in two states comparing three interventions: treatment as usual (TAU), TAU with measurement-based care (TAU+), and the Unified Protocol forTransdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders in Adolescents with MBC (UPA)...

OBJECTIVE: Rural teens are less likely to access care for depression than urban teens. Evidence-based digital single-session interventions (SSIs), offered via social media advertisements, may be well suited to narrowing this gap in treatment access and increasing access to support for adolescents living in rural areas. We evaluated the viability of using social media-based advertisements to equitably recruit adolescents living in rural areas with elevated depression symptoms to digital SSIs; we sought to characterize and assess whether SSI completion rates and acceptability differed for adolescents living in rural versus more urban areas, across three intervention conditions (two active, evidence-based SSIs; one placebo control); and we tested whether digital SSIs differentially reduced depressive symptoms...

OBJECTIVE: The identification of a common set of symptoms for assessing cognitive disengagement syndrome (CDS, formerly sluggish cognitive tempo) for early childhood (ages 5-8), middle childhood (ages 9-12), and adolescence (ages 13-16) is needed to advance research on the developmental psychopathology of CDS (i.e. a common symptom set with comparable internal and external validity for each age group). METHOD: Parents of a nationally representative sample of 5,525 Spanish children and adolescents (ages 5 to 16, 56...

OBJECTIVE: Ample evidence demonstrates that structural stigma - defined as societal-level conditions, cultural norms, and institutional policies and practices that constrain opportunities, resources, and well-being of stigmatized populations - is associated with psychopathology in adults from marginalized groups. Yet there is limited research on whether structural stigma is similarly associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms among youth. METHOD: Structural stigma related to sex, sexual orientation, race, and Latinx ethnicity was measured using indicators of state-level policy and aggregated attitudes...

Mental health disparities in transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth are well-documented. These disparities are often studied in the context of minority stress theory, and most of this research focuses on experiences of trauma and discrimination TGD youth experience after coming out. However, TGD youth may be targets of violence and victimization due to perceived gender nonconformity before coming out. In this Future Directions, we integrate research on attachment, developmental trauma, and effects of racism and homophobia on mental health to propose a social-affective developmental framework for TGD youth...

Centering the perspectives of youth with lived experience (YWLE) in psychopathology is critical to engaging in impactful clinical research to improve youth mental health outcomes. Over the past decade there has been a greater push in clinical science to include community members, and especially community members with lived experience, in all aspects of the research process. The goal of this editorial is to highlight the need for and importance of integrating YWLE into every stage of clinical science research, from idea generation to interpretation and dissemination of research findings...

OBJECTIVE: Clinically impairing irritability and temper outbursts are among the most common psychiatric problems in youth and present transdiagnostically; however, few mechanistically informed treatments have been developed. Here, we test the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of a novel exposure-based treatment with integrated parent management skills for youth with severe irritability using a randomized between-subjects multiple baseline design. METHOD: N  = 41 patients (Age, Mean (SD) = 11...

OBJECTIVE: Positive associations between therapeutic alliance and outcome (e.g. youth symptom severity) have been documented in the youth anxiety literature; however, little is known about the conditions under which early alliance contributes to positive outcomes in youth. The present study examined the relations between therapeutic alliance, session attendance, and outcomes in youths ( N  = 135; 55.6% female) who participated in a randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy or client-centered therapy for anxiety...