Background: Children who experience early adversity often develop emotion regulatory problems, but little is known about the mechanisms that mediate this relation. We tested whether general associative learning processes contribute to associations between adversity, in the form of child maltreatment, and negative behavioral outcomes. Methods:…

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) typically onsets in adolescence and is associated with multiple impairments. Despite promising clinical interventions, most socially anxious adolescents remain untreated. To address this clinical neglect, we developed a school-based, 12-week group intervention for youth with SAD, "Skills for Academic…

Background: To evaluate whether the symptoms of children and adolescents with clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) form classes consistent with the diagnostic criteria of complex PTSD (CPTSD) as proposed for the ICD-11, and to relate the emerging classes with treatment outcome of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy…

Background: This study investigated the long-term effectiveness of Preventure, a selective personality-targeted prevention program, in reducing the uptake of alcohol, harmful use of alcohol, and alcohol-related harms over a 3-year period. Methods: A cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted to assess the effectiveness of Preventure.…

Background: People with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) typically have mild to moderate intellectual deficits, compulsivity, hyperphagia, obesity, and growth hormone deficiencies. Growth hormone treatment (GHT) in PWS has well-established salutatory effects on linear growth and body composition, yet cognitive benefits of GHT, seen in other patient…

Background: Response inhibition, working memory, and response variability are possible endophenotypes of ADHD based on their association with the disorder and evidence of heritability. One of the critical although rarely studied criteria for a valid endophenotype is that it persists despite waxing and waning of the overt manifestations of the…

Background: A substantial minority of adolescents suffer from depression and it is associated with increased risk of suicide, social and educational impairment, and mental health problems in adulthood. A recently conducted randomized controlled trial in England evaluated the effectiveness of a manualized universally delivered age-appropriate CBT…

Background: The behavioural symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are thought to reflect underlying cognitive deficits/differences. The findings in the literature are somewhat mixed regarding the cognitive features of ASD. This study attempted to address this issue by investigating a range of cognitive deficits and the prevalence of multiple…

Background: The relationship between inadequate sleep and mood has been well-established in adults and is supported primarily by correlational data in younger populations. Given that adolescents often experience shortened sleep on school nights, we sought to better understand the effect of experimentally induced chronic sleep restriction on…

Background: Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on…

Background: Two understudied risk factors that have been linked to emotional difficulties in adolescence are chronotype and sleep deprivation. This study extended past research by using an experimental design to investigate the role of sleep deprivation and chronotype on emotion in adolescents. It was hypothesized that sleep deprivation and an…

Background: Psychopathy is characterized by profound affective deficits, including shallow affect and reduced empathy. Recent research suggests that these deficits may apply particularly to negative emotions, or to certain negative emotions such as fear. Despite increased focus on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of psychopathy, little is…

Background: The capacity to control or regulate one's emotions, cognitions and behavior is central to competent functioning, with limitations in these abilities associated with developmental problems. Parenting appears to influence such self-regulation. Here the differential-susceptibility hypothesis is tested that the more putative "plasticity…

Background: The juvenile justice system's interventions are expected to help reduce recidivism. However, previous studies suggest that official processing in juvenile court fails to reduce adolescents' criminal behavior in the following year. Longer term effects have not yet been investigated with a rigorous method. This study used propensity…

Background: Reviews have highlighted anxious youths' affective disturbances, specifically, elevated negative emotions and reliance on ineffective emotion regulation strategies. However, no study has examined anxious youth's emotional reactivity and regulation in real-world contexts. Methods: This study utilized an ecological momentary assessment…