Publications by authors named "Michele R Smith"

Article Synopsis
  • This study looked at how people feel and how it relates to how much alcohol they drink.
  • Researchers found that people do not drink more when they’re feeling sad or upset, but they drink more when they're feeling happy.
  • The results are important because they challenge the idea that people drink mainly to cope with negative feelings, and now researchers want to look deeper into this topic.
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Although frequently hypothesized, the evidence for associations between affect and marijuana use in everyday life remains ambiguous. Inconsistent findings across existing work may be due, in part, to differences in study design and analytic decisions, such as study inclusion criteria, the operationalization of affect, or the timing of affect assessment. We used specification curves to assess the robustness of the evidence for affect predicting same-day marijuana use and marijuana use predicting next-day affect across several hundred models that varied in terms of decisions that reflect those typical in this literature (e.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study analyzed how pre-existing mental health conditions and coping strategies affected low-income women's mental health during COVID-19, focusing on their perceptions of threat and support satisfaction.
  • - Results showed that resilience influenced active coping, while anxiety and depression before the pandemic led to avoidant coping and lower satisfaction with support.
  • - Increased anxiety and depression during the pandemic were linked to low self-compassion, threat appraisal, and COVID-19 hardships, stressing the need for targeted prevention and intervention strategies for vulnerable populations.
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While appraisal and coping are known to impact adolescent psychopathology, more vulnerable or resilient responses to stress may depend on individual temperament. This study examined early life temperament as a moderator of the prospective relations of pre-adolescent appraisal and coping with adolescent psychopathology. The sample included 226 (62% female, 14-15 years) adolescents with assessments starting at 3 years of age.

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  • - This study explored how children's TV viewing relates to their ability to control impulses (effortful control), considering the influence of family risks like maternal depression and parental status.
  • - Data was collected from 306 parents and preschoolers over four assessments from 2008 to 2010, revealing that higher TV time is linked to lower executive control skills, while better control skills can reduce TV time.
  • - The study concluded that developing executive control in early childhood contributes to better social and academic readiness, while excessive TV viewing may negatively impact academic performance, with family factors influencing both areas.
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Emotion regulation (ER) is an important factor in resilience and overall well-being throughout development, and youth report increased variation in emotion and capacity for regulation across adolescence and early adulthood. Specific emotions may be associated with the use of different ER strategies, but much evidence exclusively collapses across negative and positive affect or may not reflect the daily experience of emotion and emotion regulation. The present study examined associations between the experience of unique positive and negative emotions and the use of common ER strategies in adolescence and early adulthood during daily life using ecological momentary assessment (EMA).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzes the relationship between negative emotions and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors, suggesting that engaging in these behaviors can temporarily reduce negative feelings.
  • It includes data from 38 studies involving 1,644 participants, providing evidence that negative emotions tend to increase before such behaviors and decrease afterward.
  • The findings highlight that self-injurious thoughts and behaviors can serve as a coping mechanism for emotional distress, emphasizing their function in regulating negative affect rather than being solely harmful.
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Parents living in low-income contexts shouldered disproportionate hardships during the COVID-19 pandemic with consequences to maternal mental health and child adjustment. The current study uses a sample of first-time mothers (N = 147) of young toddlers, all living in low-income contexts, to examine the roles of pre-pandemic and COVID-19-specific risk and individual resilience factors in the prediction of changes to maternal mental health coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. Maternal mental health symptoms, in turn, were examined as predictors of child adjustment problems across 6 months of the pandemic and as a potential mechanism conferring pandemic risks to children.

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The current study broadens our understanding of preschoolers' early math experiences with parents, recognizing that math knowledge and experiences are inclusive of numeracy as well as non-numeracy domains. Parents and preschoolers (N = 45) were observed exploring three domains of early mathematics knowledge (i.e.

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Difficulties with emotion regulation can take many forms, including increased sensitivity to emotional cues and habitual use of maladaptive cognitive or behavioral regulation strategies. Despite extensive research on emotion regulation and youth adjustment, few studies integrate multiple measures of emotion regulation. The present study evaluated the underlying structure of emotion regulation processes in adolescence using both task- and survey-based measures and determined whether differences in these emotion regulation latent factors mediated the association between peer victimization and internalizing psychopathology.

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