J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol
August 2024
Objective: Self-guided digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) teaching empirically supported skills (e.g. behavioral activation) have demonstrated efficacy for improving youth mental health, but we lack evidence for the complex skill of cognitive restructuring (CR).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFToday, many social groups face negative stereotypes. Is such negativity a stable feature of society and, if so, what mechanisms maintain stability both within and across group targets? Answering these theoretically and practically important questions requires data on dozens of group stereotypes examined simultaneously over historical and societal scales, which is only possible through recent advances in Natural Language Processing. Across two studies, we use word embeddings from millions of English-language books over 100 years (1900-2000) and extract stereotypes for 58 stigmatized groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSexual minority individuals have a markedly elevated risk of depression compared to heterosexuals. We examined early threats to social safety and chronically elevated inflammation as mechanisms contributing to this disparity in depression symptoms, and compared the relative strength of the co-occurrence between chronic inflammation and depression symptoms for sexual minorities versus heterosexuals. To do so, we analyzed data from a prospective cohort of sexual minority and heterosexual young adults (n = 595), recruited from a nationally representative sample, that included assessments of early threats to social safety in the form of adverse childhood interpersonal events, three biomarkers of inflammation (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Structural forms of stigma and discrimination are associated with adverse health outcomes across numerous stigmatized groups, including lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. However, the biological consequences of structural stigma among LGB populations are understudied. To begin to address this gap, we assessed associations between indicators of structural stigma (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLancet Public Health
February 2024
Health disparities related to sexual orientation and gender identity exist across multiple outcomes. Scholarship has begun to evaluate whether structural stigma-ie, societal-level conditions, cultural norms, and institutional policies that constrain opportunities, resources, and wellbeing-contributes to health burdens among LGBTQ+ individuals. We conducted a comprehensive review of quantitative studies examining this hypothesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBullying is one of the most common forms of youth violence and is associated with myriad adverse consequences over the life course. There has been increasing interest in examining whether anti-bullying legislation is effective in preventing bullying victimization and its negative effects. However, a lack of data structures that comprehensively and longitudinally assess anti-bullying legislation and its provisions has hampered this effort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: More than 70% of new HIV diagnoses in the United States were among men who have sex with men (MSM) in 2019. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a transformative innovation for reducing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections. Structural stigma against sexual minorities, including in the form of state-level policies, may affect PrEP implementation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Clin Child Adolesc Psychol
November 2023
Objective: Ample evidence demonstrates that structural stigma - defined as societal-level conditions, cultural norms, and institutional policies and practices that constrain opportunities, resources, and well-being of stigmatized populations - is associated with psychopathology in adults from marginalized groups. Yet there is limited research on whether structural stigma is similarly associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms among youth.
Method: Structural stigma related to sex, sexual orientation, race, and Latinx ethnicity was measured using indicators of state-level policy and aggregated attitudes.
Purpose: To characterize the relationship between implementation of an antibullying law and bullying rates among high school youth.
Methods: School staff (administrators, counselors, and teachers) from public high schools in Maine completed a survey assessing: (1) the frequency with which they implemented 17 components of their district's antibullying policy as mandated by state law; and (2) confidence in implementing the law. Their responses were linked to data on bullying victimization among high school respondents to the Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey, which created a population-based dataset of 84 high schools with 29,818 student responses.
The social world is carved into a complex variety of groups each associated with unique stereotypes that persist and shift over time. Innovations in natural language processing (word embeddings) enabled this comprehensive study on variability and correlates of change/stability in both manifest and latent stereotypes for 72 diverse groups tracked across 115 years of four English-language text corpora. Results showed, first, that group stereotypes changed by a moderate-to-large degree in manifest content (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Although systemic inequities, broadly defined, are associated with health disparities in adults, there is a dearth of research linking contextual measures of exclusionary policies or prejudicial attitudes to health impairments in children, particularly among Latino populations. In this study, we examined a composite measure of systemic inequities in relation to the cooccurrence of multiple health problems in Latino children in the United States.
Methods: Participants included 17 855 Latino children aged 3 to 17 years from the National Survey of Children's Health (2016-2020).
Sexual violence (SV) is a stigmatized form of trauma, yet the stigma experiences of those reporting SV are often assumed rather than explicitly measured. We adapted a measure that quantified three key features of SV stigma across three levels: negative self-image (individual), disclosure concerns (interpersonal), and concerns about public attitudes (structural). We administered this measure to a population-based sample of Swedish young adults ( = 453) who reported a history of either sexual assault (SA) or intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMacrostructural characteristics, such as cost of living and state-level anti-poverty programs relate to the magnitude of socioeconomic disparities in brain development and mental health. In this study we leveraged data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study from 10,633 9-11 year old youth (5115 female) across 17 states. Lower income was associated with smaller hippocampal volume and higher internalizing psychopathology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ)-affirmative cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focused on minority stress processes can address gay and bisexual men's transdiagnostic mental and behavioral health concerns. Identifying moderators of treatment outcomes may inform the mechanisms of LGBQ-affirmative CBT and subpopulations who may derive particular benefit.
Method: Data were from a clinical trial in which gay and bisexual men with mental and behavioral health concerns were randomized to receive Effective Skills to Empower Effective Men (ESTEEM; an LGBQ-affirmative transdiagnostic CBT; = 100) or one of two control conditions ( = 154): LGBQ-affirmative community mental health treatment (CMHT) or HIV counseling and testing (HCT).
Research into correlates and predictors of emotion regulation has focused almost exclusively on individual differences and the immediate situation. Here, we consider whether features of macro-social contexts may also shape emotion regulation. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a longitudinal study of 502 gay and bisexual men living in 269 U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Transgender adolescents experience adversity accessing mental healthcare, which is exacerbated by transgender-specific mental health provider shortages in the United States. Factors associated with variability in transgender-specific mental health provider availability across states - especially at the macro-social level - have yet to be identified, hindering efforts to address these shortages. To remedy this gap, we queried whether transgender-specific adolescent mental health provider availability varied by states' transgender-specific policy climate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The adolescent health consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline remain underexplored. We test whether initiating components of the school-to-prison pipeline-suspensions, expulsions, and school policing-are associated with higher school-average levels of student substance use, depressed feelings, and developmental risk in the following year.
Method: We linked 2003-2014 data from the California Healthy Kids Survey and the Civil Rights Data Collection from over 4,800 schools and 4,950,000 students.
Objective: Gay and bisexual men have significantly higher rates of depression than heterosexual men. The minority stress theory (Meyer, 2003) proposed that distal minority stressors, like interpersonal discrimination, contribute to this disparity. The psychological mediation framework (Hatzenbuehler, 2009) posited several psychosocial mechanisms through which distal minority stress creates elevations in depression among sexual minorities.
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