Publications by authors named "Alex E Keller"

Pediatricians are typically the first people families trust to discuss their child's mental health concerns and are uniquely positioned to help address the problem of limited access to mental health services. This article covers brief behavioral interventions pediatricians can use to help treat mild depressive symptoms in the primary care context. Interventions include strategies for talking about depression (eg, validating experiences, normalizing difficulties, and emphasizing whole-body health), educating patients and their families (eg, psychoeducation about signs, symptoms, and treatment options), using brief behavioral and cognitive interventions (eg, behavioral activation and cognitive coping), and including a family and culturally sensitive approach to symptom management.

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The Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tic Disorders (CBIT) has demonstrated efficacy in large randomized controlled trials for children (≥9 yrs), adolescents and adults with Tourette Syndrome and Chronic Tic Disorders. Given the early age of onset for tic disorders, a large portion of affected individuals with chronic tic disorders are less than 9 years of age and appropriate developmental adaptations of behavioral treatment have not yet been tested. The goal of this study was to adapt and evaluate the acceptability and utility of a family-based adaptation of CBIT for children under 9 years of age.

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Distress Intolerance (DI), defined as the perceived inability to tolerate negative mood states and experiential discomfort, has been posited as a vulnerability factor for several anxiety and emotional disorders. There is a relative paucity of research on DI in youth samples, in large part due to the absence of a psychometrically sound measure of DI in youth. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Distress Intolerance Index for Youth (DII-Y) and the Distress Intolerance Index for Youth-Parent Report (DII-Y-P), which are downward extension adaptations of the adult-oriented Distress Intolerance Index (McHugh & Otto, 2012).

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Competing theories on the etiology and treatment of chronic tic disorders and Tourette syndrome have long made the search for efficacious intervention more challenging for patients and families seeking to reduce functional impairment related to tic symptoms. These symptoms were historically posited to be either psychological in origin, leading to the long tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for tics, or biological in nature, particularly since the advent of successful treatments using neuroleptic medications. Current thinking about the phenomenology of tic disorders comes from growing empirical evidence as well as advances in neuroscience and genetics research and reveals a biological vulnerability that is exacerbated by physiological arousal related to environmental or interpersonal stress.

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Empathizing-Systemizing theory posits a continuum of cognitive traits extending from autism into normal cognitive variation. Covariance data on empathizing and systemizing traits have alternately suggested inversely dependent, independent, and sex-dependent (one sex dependent, the other independent) structures. A total of 144 normal undergraduates (65 men, 79 women) completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes, Embedded Figures, and Benton face recognition tests, the Autism Spectrum Quotient, and measures of digit length ratio and field of study; some also completed tests of motion coherence threshold (64) and go/no-go motor inhibition (128).

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