Prioritizing digital well-being for teens helps them develop healthy relationships with technology and navigate the digital world safely. This Spotlight will help one learn how social media is affecting many teen girls' sleep and mental health; explore tips to support students' mental health; investigate how social media habits can influence…

Difficulties in communication during social interactions are a feature of the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little is known about the communication abilities of minimally-verbal (MV) individuals, which comprises one-third of autistic individuals. Natural language sampling (NLS) provides an optimal approach to capture communication…

Despite many programs for educating social skills to adolescents with autism, insufficient attention has been paid to examine the optimal conditions and strategies that are important for improvement and generalization of the learned skills. So after reviewing and searching for three PubMed, Scopus, and ProQuest databases, 20 studies were finally…

This piece builds on scholarship in African American parading and Black Girls' Literacies by presenting parading as a metaphor to analyze a website created by nine Black adolescent girls. I draw on multimodal analysis frameworks to understand the symbolic nature of the site and its components, as well as how the girls use it as a platform to speak…

Despite reaching global parity in enrollment, gender and wealth disparities in education continue to undermine girls' learning and opportunities in low- & middle- income countries. This data brief was created by the Population Council's GIRL Center and the Evidence for Gender and Education Resource (EGER) in collaboration with the Girls First…

The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist's attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid's work of fiction, "Annie John" (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist's maturity…

New technologies (NT) are increasingly used in Occupational Therapy (OT) interventions in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We conducted a scoping review to describe OT interventions investigated in scientific literature which use NT in children and adolescents with ASD. Two authors independently searched the scientific databases PubMed,…

Individual differences in cognitive abilities emerge early during development, and children with poorer cognition are at increased risk for adverse outcomes as they enter adolescence. Caregiving plays an important role in supporting cognitive development, yet it remains unclear how specific types of caregiving behaviors may shape cognition,…

Background: Little is known about the effects of outdoor behavioral healthcare on participants' body composition or about the relationship between body changes and indicators of mental health. Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to compare body and mental health changes in adolescents in an 8-week adventure therapy program.…

Previous findings on the association between theory of mind (ToM) and aggression in children are mixed. The "social skills deficit view" regarded ToM as a "single-edged sword" and proposed that a lack of ToM can lead to aggression, while the "double-edged sword view" proposed that children with advanced ToM can still…

Background: Bullying victimization is a risk factor for social anxiety and disrupted classroom concentration among young people. Self-esteem has been implicated as a protective factor, but extant literature is sparse. Aims: Aim of present study was to test if a new measure of authentic self-esteem can buffer the negative effects of bullying…

This study investigated the relationship between academic self-efficacy, academic procrastination, and well-being among Azerbaijani participants. The data was collected from 1657 participants who completed self-reported questionnaires measuring academic self-efficacy, academic procrastination, and well-being. The analyses of the study involved the…

Prolonged dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) may increase propensity for physical or psychiatric illness. The current study examined differences in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) regulation in 215 adolescents with or without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at Time 1 (T1; 10-13 years old) and 1 year later (Time 2; T2). Linear…

Objective: The responsibility of implementing nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) policy falls largely on school principals, yet few have received training regarding adolescent NSSI. Understanding principals' perceptions and roles in responding to NSSI among their students is essential to determining how best to address and reduce NSSI within school…

Metacognition refers to cognitions about our own cognitions. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to examine metacognition among autistic people. The results from these studies have produced a mixed picture, with some concluding that autistic people are just as accurate as typically developing people in judging their own cognitions…