Finding a Needle in a Haystack: A Systematic Approach for Searching Through Public Databases for Youth Mental Well-Being Programs.

Background: This practice paper exemplifies a systematic approach used to learn about existing mental well-being programs for youth 11-14 years to inform curriculum development for after-school settings.

Methods: We reviewed 3389 mental well-being programs from publicly accessed databases and conducted a content analysis using inductive and deductive coding to explore the domains each program addressed.

Results: Through our content analysis of the final eight programs, we found strong alignment with the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) core social-emotional competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and decision-making.

Investigating cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between brain structure and distinct dimensions of externalizing psychopathology in the ABCD sample.

Externalizing psychopathology in childhood is a predictor of poor outcomes across the lifespan. Children exhibiting elevated externalizing symptoms also commonly show emotion dysregulation and callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Examining cross-sectional and longitudinal neural correlates across dimensions linked to externalizing psychopathology during childhood may clarify shared or distinct neurobiological vulnerability for psychopathological impairment later in life.

Strengthening Youth Emotional and Behavioral Well-Being Through Community-Academic Partnership: The EMPOWER Project.

The onset of mental health issues frequently starts during adolescence, where one third of adolescents who are 14 years and younger receive a mental health diagnosis. The state of youth mental health is a major public health concern. The EMPOWER project was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to address youth mental health.

Threat, Emotion Dysregulation, and Parenting in a Clinical Sample of Children with Disruptive Behaviour.

Early-life adversity is associated with the development of internalizing and externalizing problems in children. Despite this, there is a need to understand the mechanisms linking these experiences to psychopathology, especially in clinical samples. This cross-sectional study tested emotion dysregulation as a mechanism linking early-life threat to psychopathology in a clinical sample of children with disruptive behavior problems.

An Integrated Care Pathway for depression in adolescents: protocol for a Type 1 Hybrid Effectiveness-implementation, Non-randomized, Cluster Controlled Trial.

Introduction: Our group developed an Integrated Care Pathway to facilitate the delivery of evidence-based care for adolescents experiencing depression called CARIBOU-2 (Care for Adolescents who Receive Information 'Bout OUtcomes, 2 iteration). The core pathway components are assessment, psychoeducation, psychotherapy options, medication options, caregiver support, measurement-based care team reviews and graduation. We aim to test the clinical and implementation effectiveness of the CARIBOU-2 pathway relative to treatment-as-usual (TAU) in community mental health settings.

Predictors of Health-Related Quality of Life in Neurodivergent Children: A Systematic Review.

Health-related Quality of Life (HRQoL) is a multi-faceted construct influenced by a myriad of environmental, demographic, and individual characteristics. Our understanding of these influencers remains highly limited in neurodevelopmental conditions. Existing research in this area is sparse, highly siloed by diagnosis labels, and focused on symptoms.

Systematic Integration of Multi-Informant Externalizing Ratings in Clinical Settings.

Best practice clinical assessment of externalizing problems often necessitates collection of information from parents, youth themselves, and teachers. The present study tested the predictive validity of a psychometrically-driven scoring procedure to integrate multi-informant, dimensional ratings of externalizing problems. Participants were 2264 clinic-referred youth ages 6-18.

Protocol for a randomized control trial of the Building Regulation in Dual Generations Program (BRIDGE): preventing the intergenerational transmission of mental illness in at-risk preschool children.

Background: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worldwide prevalence of maternal depression has risen sharply; it is now estimated that one quarter of mothers experience clinically significant depression symptoms. Exposure to maternal depression during early childhood increases the risk for the development of childhood mental illness (MI) in offspring, with altered parenting practices mediating the association between maternal depression and child outcomes. Dual-generation interventions, which aim to simultaneously treat parent and child mental health, show promise for improving outcomes for mothers with depression and their young children.

Stepping up to COVID-19: A Clinical Trial of a Telepsychology Positive Parenting Program Targeting Behavior Problems in Children With Neurological Risk.

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a stepped-care parenting program implemented during COVID-19 among families of behaviorally at-risk children with neurological or neurodevelopmental disorders aged 3-9 years.

Methods: Stepped-care I-InTERACT-North increased psychological support across 3 steps, matched to family needs: (1) guided self-help (podcast), (2) brief support, and (3) longer-term parent support. The intervention was provided by clinicians at The Hospital for Sick Children.

Physiological Dysregulation in Children With and Without Externalizing Difficulties: Novel Insights From Intensive Longitudinal Data.

Extant research on physiological dysregulation in children has focused on point-in-time measures and absolute mean levels of physiology. However, these methods do not capture dynamic fluctuations in physiology that characterize dysregulation. In the present work, we aimed to assess whether physiological dysregulation as captured by fluctuations rather than mean levels would differentiate between children with and without clinically elevated levels of externalizing behavior.

Individual- and family-level associations between child psychopathology and parenting.

Parenting can protect against the development of, or increase risk for, child psychopathology; however, it is unclear if parenting is related to psychopathology symptoms in a specific domain, or to broad liability for psychopathology. Parenting differs between and within families, and both overall family-level parenting and the child-specific parenting a child receives may be important in estimating transdiagnostic associations with psychopathology. Data come from a cross-sectional epidemiological sample ( = 10,605 children ages 4-17, 6434 households).

Autonomic Arousal, Ethical Guilt, and Externalizing Behavior in Childhood: A Clinical Extension and Replication.

Lower autonomic arousal is associated with higher externalizing behavior in childhood but the mechanisms explaining this link are still debated. One possibility is that lower autonomic arousal makes it difficult for children to anticipate or express social emotions, such as ethical guilt rooted in concern for others, thereby increasing their likelihood of externalizing behavior. However, evidence for this social-emotional hypothesis has been limited to community samples.

Multiple needs and multiple treatments. What's a clinician to do? Update on the psychosocial treatment of disruptive behaviours in childhood.

Purpose Of Review: There are a wide range of psychosocial treatment options, delivered in different modalities, for children with disruptive behaviour. However, clinicians face many challenges in ensuring the empirically supported treatments (ESTs) they select will be effective for their patient. This has prompted studies to generate knowledge on how to improve treatment outcomes for children with disruptive behaviour.

Examining the mental health of siblings of children with a mental disorder: A scoping review protocol.

Introduction: Mental disorders affect 1 in 5 children having consequences for both the child and their family. Indeed, the siblings of these children are not insulated from these consequences and may experience elevated levels of psychological distress, placing them at increased risk for developing mental disorders. This protocol describes the methodology for a scoping review that will examine how mental disorders in children impact the mental health of their sibling(s).

Facial emotion recognition in children and youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and irritability.

The ability to recognize emotions evident in people's faces contributes to social functioning and might be affected by ADHD and irritability. Given their high co-occurrence, we examined the relative contribution of ADHD and irritability to facial emotion recognition (FER). We hypothesized that irritability but not ADHD traits would predict increased likelihood of misrecognizing emotions as negative, and that FER performance would explain the association of ADHD and irritability traits with social skills.

Age-Related Variance in Performance versus Ratings of Attention and Impulse Regulation in Children: Implications for the Assessment of ADHD.

Executive function task (EF) deficits are hypothesized to underlie difficulties with self-regulation. However, tasks assessing EF impairments have only been weakly correlated with rating scales that index self-regulation difficulties. A community sample of children and youth aged between 8 and 20 years old were assessed longitudinally.

Testing Bidirectional, Longitudinal Associations Between Disturbed Sleep and Depressive Symptoms in Children and Adolescents Using Cross-Lagged Models.

Importance: Understanding the longitudinal, bidirectional associations between disturbed sleep and depression in childhood and adolescence is crucial for the development of prevention and intervention programs.

Objective: To test for bidirectional associations and cascade processes between disturbed sleep and depressive symptoms covering both childhood and adolescence and to test for the moderating processes of sex and pubertal status in adolescence.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A prospective cohort study using the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (QLSCD; 1997-ongoing).

Mindfulness, Parental Attributions, and Parenting: the Moderating Role of Child Mental Health.

Objectives: Research interest in mindfulness, the capacity for present-oriented, nonjudgmental attention and awareness, and its relation to parenting has been growing in recent years. However, factors facilitating the association between mindfulness and parenting are not yet well understood. In the present study, we examined whether parents' biased causal thinking about children's misbehaviors, i.