TRANSFORMing theory to practice: Developing and implementing an anti-racist, community-based racial stress and trauma group intervention for BIPOC youth.

Evidence-informed trauma interventions developed specifically and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) that address racial, historical, and intergenerational trauma are sparse, particularly for youth. To meet this need, the current study developed and piloted a new intervention - (TRANSFORM) - using a and community-engaged research-to-practice approach. Across two phases, we documented the community-participatory development of TRANSFORM and analyzed preliminarily quantitative data collected in a pilot study with  = 19 BIPOC youth.

Sensory processing challenges as a novel link between early caregiving experiences and mental health.

Early caregiving adversity (ECA) is associated with elevated psychological symptomatology. While neurobehavioral ECA research has focused on socioemotional and cognitive development, ECA may also increase risk for "low-level" sensory processing challenges. However, no prior work has compared how diverse ECA exposures differentially relate to sensory processing, or, critically, how this might influence psychological outcomes.

Leveraging Leadership in Child Welfare Systems: Large-scale Trauma- and Resilience-informed Training Initiative.

Strengthening the infrastructure of public health systems around trauma-informed principles is crucial to addressing the needs of traumatized children in the child welfare system. In fact, many local and state initiatives have focused on large-scale evaluation studies to determine the value of training direct service staff on trauma foundations. Less yet is known about the benefits of training leaders on trauma foundations, which is crucial given their unique influence on implementation decisions.

Long-term effects of pre-adoptive risk on emotional and behavioral functioning in children adopted from foster care.

Background: Children adopted from foster care are at heightened risk for emotional and behavioral challenges, potentially due to early trauma exposure and related risk factors. Research has demonstrated that adoptees with greater pre-adoptive risk exhibit higher rates of internalizing and externalizing problems across childhood and into adulthood. However, these studies have been limited by their use of individual risk factors or sum scores of cumulative risk and their measurement of internalizing and externalizing behaviors separately.

Developmental Outcomes of Infants Adopted from Foster Care: Predictive Associations from Perinatal and Preplacement Risk Factors.

Infants adopted domestically from foster care often present with prenatal substance exposure and risky birth outcomes such as prematurity and low birth weight. Because few longitudinal studies of foster-adoptive infants exist, it is unclear how these preplacement risk factors influence development over time. The present study examined associations between perinatal risk factors and developmental outcomes among an ethnically/racially-diverse sample of 97 infants in foster-care (56% boys) placed into adoptive homes at ages 0-19 months.

Leveraging a public-public partnership in Los Angeles County to address COVID-19 for children, youth, and families in underresourced communities.

There is growing concern about the mental health and social impact of COVID-19 on underresourced children, youth, and families given widespread social disruption, school closures, economic impact, and loss of lives. In this commentary we describe how an existing public-public partnership between a large county mental health department and a state university responded to COVID-19. This partnership, originally designed to address workforce needs, rapidly pivoted to support providers through a trauma- and resilience-informed approach to mitigating adverse mental health effects among youth and families in Los Angeles County.

Mediators of youth anxiety outcomes 3 to 12 years after treatment.

Objective: Test changes in perceived coping efficacy, negative self-statements, and interpretive biases to threat during treatment as potential mediators of the relationship between randomly assigned treatment conditions and long-term anxiety follow-ups. Age at randomization was also tested as a moderator of mediational relationships.

Method: Participants included 319 youth (ages 7-17) from the Child/Adolescent Multimodal Study (CAMS) who participated in a naturalistic follow-up beginning an average of 6.

A Cross-Site Partnership to Examine Implementation and Sustainability of a School-Based Trauma Program.

Objectives: Schools have been identified as an ideal setting for increasing access to mental health services particularly for underserved minority youth. The emerging field of implementation science has begun to systematically investigate strategies for more efficiently integrating evidence-based practices into community settings. Significantly less translational research has focused specifically on the school setting.

Applying a Trauma Informed School Systems Approach: Examples from School Community-Academic Partnerships.

Objectives: Schools can play an important role in addressing the effects of traumatic stress on students by providing prevention, early intervention, and intensive treatment for children exposed to trauma. This article aims to describe key domains for implementing trauma-informed practices in schools.

Design: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) has identified trauma-informed domains and principles for use across systems of care.

Implementing the Bounce Back trauma intervention in urban elementary schools: A real-world replication trial.

The current study provides the first replication trial of Bounce Back, a school-based intervention for elementary students exposed to trauma, in a different school district and geographical area. Participants in this study were 52 1st through 4th graders (Mage = 7.76 years; 65% male) who were predominately Latino (82%).

Temperamental sensitivity to early maltreatment and later family cohesion for externalizing behaviors in youth adopted from foster care.

Children in foster care frequently have histories of physical/sexual abuse and neglect, increasing their risk for externalizing behaviors (EB; e.g., aggression).

Social Interpretation Bias in Children and Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders: Psychometric Examination of the Self-report of Ambiguous Social Situations for Youth (SASSY) Scale.

Background: Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health problems in youth, and faulty interpretation bias has been positively linked to anxiety severity, even within anxiety-disordered youth. Quick, reliable assessment of interpretation bias may be useful in identifying youth with certain types of anxiety or assessing changes on cognitive bias during intervention.

Objective: This study examined the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Self-report of Ambiguous Social Situations for Youth (SASSY) scale, a self-report measure developed to assess interpretation bias in youth.

Trauma exposure in elementary school children: Description of screening procedures, level of exposure, and posttraumatic stress symptoms.

Traumatic childhood events can have a significant impact on overall child functioning. Early identification and intervention could offer significant benefits for children's mental health and educational trajectories, but how to effectively identify young children is a challenge. In this paper, we describe screening for exposure to traumatic events and associated symptoms of posttraumatic stress, and examine differences by child gender and grade level.

Developmental Differences in Functioning in Youth With Social Phobia.

Social phobia (SoP) in youth may manifest differently across development as parent involvement in their social lives changes and social and academic expectations increase. This cross-sectional study investigated whether self-reported and parent-reported functioning in youth with SoP changes with age in social, academic, and home/family domains. Baseline anxiety impairment data from 488 treatment-seeking anxiety-disordered youth (ages 7-17, N = 400 with a SoP diagnosis) and their parents were gathered using the Child Anxiety Impact Scale and were analyzed using generalized estimating equations.

Bounce back: Effectiveness of an elementary school-based intervention for multicultural children exposed to traumatic events.

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a school-based intervention for diverse children exposed to a range of traumatic events, and to examine its effectiveness in improving symptoms of posttraumatic stress, depression, and anxiety.

Method: Participants were 74 schoolchildren (Grades 1-5) and their primary caregivers. All participating students endorsed clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms.

Preventing secondary traumatic stress in educators.

Teachers can be vulnerable to secondary traumatic stress (STS) because of their supportive role with students and potential exposure to students' experiences with traumas, violence, disasters, or crises. STS symptoms, similar to those found in posttraumatic stress disorder, include nightmares, avoidance, agitation, and withdrawal, and can result from secondary exposure to hearing about students' traumas. This article describes how STS presents, how teachers can be at risk, and how STS can manifest in schools.

A web-based platform to support an evidence-based mental health intervention: lessons from the CBITS web site.

Objective: To explore the role of Web-based platforms in behavioral health, the study examined usage of a Web site for supporting training and implementation of an evidence-based intervention.

Methods: Using data from an online registration survey and Google Analytics, the investigators examined user characteristics and Web site utilization.

Results: Site engagement was substantial across user groups.

The child anxiety impact scale: examining parent- and child-reported impairment in child anxiety disorders.

The purpose of the current investigation was to examine the factor structure, reliability, and construct validity of both the Child and Parent version of the Child Anxiety Impact Scale (CAIS) using data obtained from the Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (Walkup et al., 2008 ). The CAIS child and parent versions measure anxiety-related functional impairment in school, social, and family domains.

Improving implementation of mental health services for trauma in multicultural elementary schools: stakeholder perspectives on parent and educator engagement.

Although more schools are offering mental health programs, few studies have involved the school community in research to improve their successful implementation. In this community-partnered study, focus groups were conducted with school staff and parents to explore issues related to community engagement and feasibility of a mental health intervention for elementary school students exposed to trauma. Four educator focus groups, including 23 participants, and 2 parent focus groups, consisting of 9 Spanish-speaking and 7 English-speaking parents were conducted.

Parental and Family Factors as Predictors of Threat Bias in Anxious Youth.

The present study examined the relative predictive value of parental anxiety, parents' expectation of child threat bias, and family dysfunction on child's threat bias in a clinical sample of anxious youth. Participants ( = 488) were part of the Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multi-modal study (CAMS), ages 7-17 years (M = 10.69; SD = 2.

Effects on school outcomes in low-income minority youth: preliminary findings from a community-partnered study of a school-based trauma intervention.

Objective: To examine academic outcomes of a community-partnered school mental health intervention for students exposed to community violence.

Design: Randomized controlled trial.

Setting And Participants: Sixth-grade students (N = 123) from 2 middle schools in Los Angeles during the 2001-2002 academic year who had exposure to violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms in the clinical range.

Family factors predict treatment outcome for pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Objective: To examine family conflict, parental blame, and poor family cohesion as predictors of treatment outcome for youths receiving family-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (FCBT) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Method: We analyzed data from a sample of youths who were randomized to FCBT (n = 49; 59% male; M age = 12.43 years) as part of a larger randomized clinical trial.

Anxiety, Depression, and Coping Skills Among Mexican School Children: A Comparison of Students With and Without Learning Disabilities.

The purpose of this study was to compare severity and risk status for anxiety and depression with coping skills among 130 Mexican school children with learning disabilities (LD) and 130 school children without LD. This research is the first to explore the emotional difficulties of Mexican children with LD. Children completed the Spanish version of the and , and the ().

Responding to students with posttraumatic stress disorder in schools.

The prevalence of trauma exposure among youth is a major public health concern. Students who have experienced a traumatic event are at increased risk for academic, social, and emotional problems. School can be an ideal setting for mental health professionals to intervene with traumatized students, school staff, and parents both immediately following a traumatic event and when symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related mental health problems develop.

Going to Scale: Experiences Implementing a School-Based Trauma Intervention.

This article describes implementation experiences "scaling up" the Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS)-an intervention developed using a community partnered research framework. Case studies from two sites that have successfully implemented CBITS are used to examine macro- and school-level implementation processes and strategies used to address implementation issues and create a successful implementation support system. Key elements of the implementation support system include pre-implementation work, ongoing clinical and logistical implementation supports, promotion of fidelity to the intervention's core components, tailored implementation to fit the service context, and a value on monitoring child outcomes.