Publications by authors named "Paul Pilkonis"

Background: Mindfulness meditation is ubiquitous in health care, education, and communities at large. Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) are the focus of hundreds of NIH-funded trials given the myriad health benefits associated with this practice across multiple populations. Notwithstanding, significant gaps exist in how mindfulness concepts are measured using currently available self-report instruments.

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Unlabelled: Interpersonal and emotional functioning are closely linked and reciprocally influence one another. Contemporary integrative interpersonal theory (CIIT) offers a useful framework to conceptualize these patterns and guide interventions in cases where these patterns result in dysfunction. Stress processes offer several dynamic frameworks to guide empirical investigations using methods that allow for fine-grained analyses in the context of daily life.

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Objective: The Emotion Dysregulation Inventory (EDI) was designed and validated to quantify emotion dysregulation (ED) in children aged 6+ years. The purpose of this study was to adapt the EDI for use in young children (EDI-YC).

Method: Caregivers of 2,139 young children (aged 2-5 years) completed 48 candidate EDI-YC items.

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We conducted secondary analyses of existing data to examine the association between parent scores on the Knowledge of Effective Parenting Test (KEPT) and child symptoms of Conduct Disorder (CD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Parent knowledge of behavior management skills and child behavior symptoms were assessed in a nationally representative sample of parents/guardians ( = 1,570) of children aged 5-12 from all 50 states. Results showed consistent and robust correlations between parent knowledge of behavior management skills and CD symptoms but not ODD symptoms.

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Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by an elevated distress response to social exclusion (i.e., rejection distress), the neural mechanisms of which remain unclear.

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The field of personality disorder research has grown since the publication of the , in 1980; with a notable evolution in the way that personality disorders are defined and operationalized. In evaluating this research, it is necessary to consider the range of sampling practices used. The goal of this study was to describe current sampling methods in personality disorder research and provide recommendations to guide sample design in future personality disorder research.

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Unlabelled: The predominant focus in attachment research on trait-like individual differences has overshadowed investigation of the ways in which working models of attachment represent dynamic, interpersonally responsive socio-affective systems. Intensive longitudinal designs extend previous work by evaluating to what extent attachment varies over social interactions and the functional processes that underlie its fluctuation. We examined momentary activation of attachment orientations in the stream of peoples' daily lives and how those patterns were linked to interpersonal behavior.

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Objective: Social relationships are a critical context for children's socioemotional development and their quality is closely linked with concurrent and future physical and emotional wellbeing. However, brief self-report measures of social relationship quality that translate across middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are lacking, limiting the ability to assess the impact of social relationships on health outcomes over time. To address this gap, this article describes the development and testing of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toolbox Pediatric Social Relationship Scales, which were developed in parallel with the previously-reported Adult Social Relationship Scales.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study aimed to establish national norms and percentiles for the Vanderbilt Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Diagnostic Parent Rating Scale (VADPRS) among children aged 5-12 in the U.S.
  • - A representative sample of 1,570 caregivers completed the VADPRS, with findings showing strong internal consistency across its five clinical subscales, along with statistically significant but minor differences related to age and sex.
  • - The results contribute to the VADPRS's usefulness in clinical and research settings, showing differences in symptoms by age and sex are statistically significant but not enough to require different screening thresholds.
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Emotion regulation (ER) is a multi-faceted and dynamic process relevant to both normative emotional development and transdiagnostic emotional dysfunction for a range of psychological disorders. There has been tremendous growth in ER research over the past decade, including the development of numerous new measures to assess ER. This Evidence Base Update included a systematic review to identify self- and informant-report questionnaire measures of ER for children and adolescents, including measures of ER strategies and effectiveness (or emotion dysregulation).

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Anxiety and depressive disorders are global public health concerns, and research suggests that these disorders are common in parents and can adversely influence family functioning. However, little is known about normative levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms in parents of school-age children. The present study reports on generalized anxiety and depressive symptoms in 1570 parents and guardians of a nationally representative sample of children ages five to twelve years using two widely used and validated questionnaires: the eight-item variant of the Patient Health Questionnaire depression scale (PHQ-8) and the seven-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7).

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We previously developed a three-item screener for identifying respondents with any personality disorder (PD) using the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP). The current goal was to examine the convergent validity of the IIP-3 with other PD screeners and diagnostic tools and to investigate its relationship to measures of adult attachment and emotion regulation. The sample consisted of participants from five studies (total = 852), with data from collateral informants available for a subsample (N = 353).

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Insecure attachment and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are defined by similar affective and interpersonal processes. Individuals diagnosed with BPD, however, represent only a subset of those described as insecurely attached, suggesting that attachment may hold broader relevance for socio-affective functioning. Based on a 21-day ecological momentary assessment protocol in a mixed clinical and community sample ( = 207) oversampled for BPD, we evaluate the discriminant validity of each construct as it influences daily interpersonal interactions.

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Individuals with personality disorders often experience romantic relationship dysfunction and have an insecure attachment style. Here, we examined attachment dynamics in dyadic interactions, focusing specifically on the role of physiological coregulation in state attachment processes in couples oversampled for personality pathology. A total of 121 couples completed a 10-minute discussion about an area of disagreement in their relationship and a 5-minute discussion in which they planned an event together.

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A model of personality pathology including both general and specific components distinguishes severity of personality dysfunction from the characteristic style of its expression. This model has been proposed as an empirically based, dimensional alternative to categorical models. In this study, we evaluated this conceptual structure by examining associations between general and specific features of personality pathology and momentary interpersonal dynamics.

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Little is known about pathogenic affective processes that cut across diverse mental disorders. The current study examines how dynamic features of positive and negative affect differ or converge across internalizing and externalizing disorders in a diagnostically diverse urban sample using bivariate dynamic structural equation modeling. One-hundred fifty-six young women completed semi-structured clinical interviews and a 21-day ecological momentary assessment protocol with seven assessments of affective states per day.

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Interpersonal dysfunction is a core feature of personality disorders, often affecting close relationships. Nevertheless, little is known about the moment-to-moment dynamic processes by which personality pathology contributes to dysfunctional relationships. Here, we investigated the role of physiological attunement during a conflict discussion in romantic couples oversampled for personality pathology.

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Objective: Psychopathology research has relied on discrete diagnoses, which neglects the unique manifestations of each individual's pathology. Borderline personality disorder combines interpersonal, affective, and behavioral regulation impairments making it particularly ill-suited to a "one size fits all" diagnosis. Clinical assessment and case formulation involve understanding and developing a personalized model for each patient's contextualized dynamic processes, and research would benefit from a similar focus on the individual.

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: We describe the development and psychometric properties of an instrument designed to assess the use of effective parenting skills reported with a daily diary. The Parenting Skill Use Diary (PSUD) was developed iteratively relying on a "common elements" approach to quantify the use of evidence-based parenting techniques for responding to child misbehaviors and positive behaviors.: The PSUD was administered online daily for seven days to parents/guardians of children aged 5-12.

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: The Emotion Dysregulation Inventory (EDI) is an informant questionnaire developed based on the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) Scientific Standards and refined through factor analyses and item response theory (IRT) analyses. Although it was developed to improve measurement of emotion dysregulation in youth with autism spectrum disorder, emotion dysregulation has transdiagnostic significance. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the EDI's psychometric properties and to establish IRT-based scores for a general population of youth.

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Interpersonal dysfunction is considered a cornerstone of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Relationships are described as intense and unstable, with individuals with BPD alternating between idealization and devaluation of relationship partners. Furthermore, a lack of stable and supportive relationships may be related to symptom maintenance and exacerbation.

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The association between depression and neuroticism is complex, but due to the difficulty in assessing neuroticism during mood episodes, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. In this study, we sought to decompose neuroticism into finer-grained elements that were uncorrelated with psychiatric symptoms and to examine the incremental validity of those elements in explaining deficits in interpersonal functioning. A bifactor model with one general factor and six specific factors fit the data well in both a depressed (=807) and a community (=1,284) sample, and the specific factors were relatively independent of acute symptoms.

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Interpersonal problems are key transdiagnostic constructs in psychopathology. In the past, investigators have neglected the importance of operationalizing interpersonal problems according to their latent structure by using divergent representations of the construct: (a) computing scores for severity, agency, and communion ("dimensional approach"), (b) classifying persons into subgroups with respect to their interpersonal profile ("categorical approach"). This hinders cumulative research on interpersonal problems, because findings cannot be integrated both from a conceptual and a statistical point of view.

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Two dimensional, hierarchical classification models of personality pathology have emerged as alternatives to traditional categorical systems: multi-tiered models with increasing numbers of factors and models that distinguish between a general factor of severity and specific factors reflecting style. Using a large sample (=840) with a range of psychopathology, we conducted exploratory factor analyses of individual personality disorder criteria to evaluate the validity of these conceptual structures. We estimated an oblique, "unfolding" hierarchy and a bifactor model, then examined correlations between these and multi-method functioning measures to enrich interpretation.

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Background: There is a need for valid self-report measures of core health-related quality of life (HRQoL) domains.

Objective: To derive brief, reliable and valid health profile measures from the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) item banks.

Methods: Literature review, investigator consensus process, item response theory (IRT) analysis, and expert review of scaling results from multiple PROMIS data sets.

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