Putting it into words: Emotion vocabulary, emotion differentiation, and depression among adolescents.

Emotion differentiation (ED; the ability to distinguish discrete internal emotion states) may reflect or benefit from knowledge of linguistic labels. The present study uses natural language processing to examine how emotion vocabulary (EV; diversity of unique emotion terms within active vocabulary) relates to ED and depression in an adolescent sample. We tested two competing preregistered (https://osf.

Maternal invalidation and child RSA reactivity to frustration interact to predict teacher-reported aggression among at-risk preschoolers.

Background: Aggression is a transdiagnostic indicator of risk and represents one of the most common reasons children are referred for mental health treatment. Theory and research highlight the impact of maternal invalidation on child aggression and suggest that its influence may vary based on differences in child physiological reactivity. Moreover, the interaction between these risk factors may be particularly pronounced among children of mothers with emotion regulation (ER) difficulties.

The role of youths' cardiac autonomic balance and parental responses to youth emotion in vulnerability to borderline personality disorder development.

Developmental models of borderline personality disorder (BPD) emphasize the effects of youths' biological vulnerabilities and their experiences of parental responses to emotion, as well as the interaction between these two elements. The current study evaluated the independent and interactive effects of two indices of autonomic nervous system response and parental responses to youth negative emotions on severity and exacerbation of youths' BPD features during the transition to adolescence. The sample consisted of 162 psychiatric youth (10-14 years; 47.

Internalizing and Externalizing Problems Among At-Risk Preschoolers: The Mediating Role of Maternal Invalidation.

Children of parents with emotion regulation (ER) difficulties may be at heightened risk for internalizing and externalizing problems, and maternal invalidation may explain this association. The current study used a cross-informant design to test the indirect effect of clinician-rated maternal ER difficulties on teacher-reported internalizing and externalizing problems through maternal invalidation. This risk pathway was tested in two groups of preschoolers: children of mothers with ER difficulties and children of mothers without ER difficulties (healthy controls; HC).

Age related sex differences in maladaptive regulatory responses to sadness: A study of youths at high and low familial risk for depression.

Offspring of parents with depression histories are at increased risk of developing depression and also report maladaptive ways of self-regulating sadness. Maladaptive regulation of sadness tends to be more prevalent among females than males and has been proposed as one explanation of sex differences in depression rates that emerge around mid-adolescence. However, there is scant information about the age at which the sex differences in maladaptive regulatory responses become evident and whether such age-related sex differences vary depending on depression risk.

Autonomic Nervous System Inflexibility During Parent-child Interactions is Related to Callous-unemotional Traits in Youth Aged 10-14 Years Old.

Youth with callous-unemotional (CU) traits are at high risk for aggression and antisocial behavior. Extant literature suggests that CU traits are related to abnormal autonomic responses to negatively-valenced emotional stimuli, although few studies have tested autonomic responding specifically during social interactions. To address this knowledge gap, the current study tested whether CU traits were related to autonomic activity, assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), during several parent-child interaction tasks designed to provoke negative emotion.

Momentary borderline personality disorder symptoms in youth as a function of parental invalidation and youth-perceived support.

Background: Parental invalidation is central to etiological models of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Previous studies relied on retrospective accounts or laboratory observations to examine these associations. There is a dearth of research assessing these constructs in daily life, and limited studies have tested the effect of parental invalidation on BPD symptoms during early adolescence, when BPD onsets.

Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being.

To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emotion vocabularies in participant-generated natural speech and examined their relationships to individual differences in mood, personality, and physical and emotional well-being.

Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of stay-at-home policies, social distancing behavior, and social resources.

Social distancing is the most visible public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but its implications for mental health are unknown. In a nationwide online sample of 435 U.S.

RSA reactivity to parent-child conflict as a predictor of dysregulated emotion and behavior in daily life.

Background: Individual variability in tonic (resting) and phasic (reactivity) respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) may underlie risk for dysregulated emotion and behavior, two transdiagnostic indicators that permeate most psychological disorders in youth. The interaction between tonic and phasic RSA may specify unique physiological profiles during the transition to adolescence. The current study utilized clinically referred youth (Mage = 12.

Sympathetic arousal during the processing of dysphoric affect by youths at high and low familial risk for depression.

Youths at high risk for depression have been shown to have problems in repairing their own sad mood. Given that sympathetic arousal has been implicated both in the experience and regulation of affect, an atypical pattern of arousal may be one of the factors that contribute to mood repair problems. In the current study, we measured sympathetic arousal of never-depressed youths at high (n = 56) and low (n = 67) familial risk for depression during sad mood induction and instructed mood repair.

Mental health and clinical psychological science in the time of COVID-19: Challenges, opportunities, and a call to action.

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding, multidimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training.

The Structure of Psychopathology in a Sample of Clinically Referred, Emotionally Dysregulated Early Adolescents.

This investigation answers and amplifies calls to model the transdiagnostic structure of psychopathology in clinical samples of early adolescents and using stringent psychometric criteria. In 162 clinically referred, clinically evaluated 11-13-year-olds, we compared a correlated two-factor model, containing latent internalizing and externalizing factors, to a bifactor model, which added a transdiagnostic general factor. We also evaluated the bifactor model psychometrically, including criterion validity with broad indicators of psychosocial functioning.

An interaction between early threat exposure and the oxytocin receptor in females: Disorder-specific versus general risk for psychopathology and social-emotional mediators.

Early threat exposure is a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology, and evidence suggests that genetic variation in the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) moderates this association. However, it is unclear if this gene-by-environment (G×E) interaction is tied to unique risk for disorder-specific outcomes or instead increases shared risk for general psychopathology. Moreover, little is known about how this G×E interaction increases risk.

Affective Dynamics Across Internalizing and Externalizing Dimensions of Psychopathology.

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.

Socially oriented thinking and the biological stress response: Thinking of friends and family predicts trajectories of salivary cortisol decline.

The cortisol stress response has been related to perceived social support, but previous studies rely on self-reported social support variables. The cortisol recovery phase in particular has been theorized to serve a social coping function, but individual differences in recovery slope have not yet been examined in relation to social coping-relevant indices. This study addressed these gaps by examining the relationship of cortisol trajectories after a socioevaluative task to individual differences in covertly assessed cognitions related to close social relationships.

Too Much Too Soon?: Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms and Romantic Relationships in Adolescent Girls.

Despite the centrality of adult romantic relationships to the conceptualization of borderline personality disorder (BPD), little is known about the earlier development of this interdependency during adolescence. Thus, we examined the co-development of romantic relationships and BPD symptoms from ages 15 to 19 in a large urban sample of girls (N = 2310) in the Pittsburgh Girls Study. We had two major aims.

Adversity and Depression: The Moderating Role of Stress Reactivity among High and Low Risk Youth.

Adverse life events have been causally linked to depression among youth at high risk for depression. But given that not all high-risk youth develop depression following adversity, individual differences in various processes, including physiological reactivity to stress, are likely to be at play. This longitudinal prospective study tested the hypothesis that, among high-risk youth exposed to adversities, extent of physiological reactivity to laboratory stress (indexed as respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) would predict subsequent depressive symptoms.

"R U Mad?": Computerized text analysis of affect in social media relates to stress and substance use among ethnic minority emerging adult males.

Objective: This study examined the interactive role of affectivity and stress in substance use severity among ethnic minority, emerging adult males, using linguistic indicators of affect obtained through social media.

Method: Participants were 119 emerging adult, ethnic minority males (ages 18-25) who provided access to their mobile phone text messaging and Facebook activity for 6-months. Computerized text analysis (LIWC2015) was used to obtain linguistic indices of positive and negative affect from texts and Facebook posts.

Less is more? Effects of exhaustive vs. minimal emotion labelling on emotion regulation strategy planning.

Previous research suggests that labelling emotions, or describing affective states using emotion words, facilitates emotion regulation. But how much labelling promotes emotion regulation? And which emotion regulation strategies does emotion labelling promote? Drawing on cognitive theories of emotion, we predicted that labelling emotions using fewer words would be less confusing and would facilitate forms of emotion regulation requiring more cognitively demanding processing of context. Participants (N = 82) mentally immersed themselves in an emotional vignette, were randomly assigned to an exhaustive or minimal emotion labelling manipulation, and then completed an emotion regulation strategy planning task.

Affect Intensity Moderates the Association of Emotional Clarity with Emotion Regulation and Depressive Symptoms in Unselected and Treatment-Seeking Samples.

Depression is associated with subjective difficulties identifying one's emotions, known as low emotional clarity, but the mediators and moderators of this relationship are not well understood. We hypothesized that the role of emotional clarity in emotion regulation and, in turn, depression depends on individual differences in negative affect intensity. In Study 1, conducted in an unselected sample (=119), low emotional clarity more strongly predicted depression symptoms among individuals higher in affect intensity.

Family functioning as perceived by parents and young offspring at high and low risk for depression.

Background: Family dysfunction has been proposed as one of the environmental mechanisms whereby risk of depression is transmitted from mothers to their children. Using our sample of offspring at high and low familial risk for depression, we hypothesized that: a) high-risk offspring (n = 79) and their mothers will report more extensive family dysfunction than low-risk offspring (n = 82) and their mothers, b) family dysfunction will predict the extent of offspring's depressive symptoms, and c) family dysfunction will mediate the impact of mother's depression on offspring's depressive symptoms.

Methods: The study enrolled 161 offspring of parents who, in a previous study, were ascertained to have either childhood onset mood disorder or no history of a major psychiatric disorder.

Observing nonreactively: a conditional process model linking mindfulness facets, cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and depression and anxiety symptoms.

Background: Mindfulness-based interventions for depression and anxiety emphasize the importance of observing present moment experience, but observing has often been positively related to anxiety and unrelated to depression symptoms. The current study sought to better understand the conditions and mechanism through which observing relates to symptoms by examining six conditional process models in which (1) nonreactivity moderates the direct effect of observing on symptoms of anxiety and depression symptoms and (2) nonreactivity moderates the indirect effect of observing on anxiety and depression via cognitive emotion regulation strategies (i.e.