Psychometric Evaluation of the Caregiver Version of the Child PTSD Symptom Scale in a Recently Immigrated, Spanish Speaking Population.

In recent years, there has been a large increase in the number of youth and families emigrating from Central America to the United States to escape extreme violence and crime victimization. As a result, the rate of trauma-exposure and trauma-related distress among this population is alarmingly high and necessitates representation of this population in psychological research, particularly related to trauma symptom measurement. The broad aim of the current study was to examine the psychometric performance of caregiver-reported data on one such instrument intended to measure youth trauma symptoms.

Pilot data supporting an attachment-based theory of adolescent social media use.

Background: Adolescents have virtually universal access to social media. Despite ample research linking attachment to social functioning in youth, neither this empirical research nor related theory has been extended to the virtual social context. The broad aim of this study was to test an attachment-based model of social media use in adolescents in order to address a gap in the literature during this developmental stage and examine attachment and the related process of mentalizing as correlates of online behavior.

Attachment and loss in the context of US immigration: caregiver separation and characteristics of internal working models of attachment in high school students.

Attachment affects a child's well-being across their lifespan. This study aimed to describe internal working models of attachment in immigrant adolescents - an often overlooked population that frequently experiences caregiver separation. Data were collected from a high school for recently immigrated youth.

Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Recidivism in Serious Juvenile Offenders: Testing the Mediating Role of Future Orientation.

Evidence suggests delinquent youth are more likely to suffer from posttraumatic stress symptoms and links those symptoms to subsequent aggressive behavior and criminal activity. Research also indicates the impact of decision-making capacity in this context. Specifically, future orientation has been shown to play an important role in adolescent delinquency; less future orientation has been linked with persistent delinquency.

Linguistic Analysis as a Method for Assessing Symptoms After Sexual Trauma Among Female Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatients.

Using a sample of female psychiatric inpatient adolescents, the current study aimed to extend this literature to an adolescent sample for the first time by examining if linguistic markers and their subcategories (cognitive process words, pronoun use, and somatosensory detail) in a trauma account are related to trauma symptomology and recovery during inpatient care. Results indicated that greater use of body words and fewer insight words were related to increased trauma symptoms at admission. In addition, use of fewer cognitive process words at admission predicted greater symptom change at discharge, extending previous research findings to an adolescent sample.

Trauma and Aggression: Investigating the Mediating Role of Mentalizing in Female and Male Inpatient Adolescents.

High rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and elevated levels of aggression are common among youth in inpatient psychiatric settings. Several models link trauma exposure to aggression through anomalous mental state reasoning. Some theoretical frameworks linking trauma to aggression specify that the over-attribution of hostile mental states contributes to the development of aggressive behavior whereas other theories suggest that an inhibition of mental state reasoning leads to aggressive behavior.