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In recent years, Brazil's non-White (Brown and Black) population became a numerical majority for the first time since the 19th century. Although we know this change was mostly due to racial reclassification, we do not know how such changes are related to skin color, the primary marker of race in Brazil. Using data from six Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), or America's Barometer, surveys from 2010 to 2023, we examine how changes in racial self-identification (White, Brown, or Black) are related to respondent skin color (light, medium, or dark). We ask how the association between self-identified race and skin color changed over the 13-y period and to what extent these trends varied by educational level. We found a "darkening" of racial identification over time, especially among those with medium and dark skin, who increasingly identified as Black. Brazilians with light skin increasingly identified as Brown, but this was partly explained by changes in interviewer reporting of skin color in the same period. We found only minor evidence that education level was related to changing racial classification over time. Our findings further understanding of recent trends in racial reclassification, which may reflect growing Black consciousness and the extension of racial quotas to both Brown and Black Brazilians in federal universities and public sector jobs., Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

Romantic experiences are more fluid and heterogeneous during middle adolescence than at any other life stage, but current understanding of this heterogeneity and flux is limited because of imprecise measurement. A sample of 531 adolescents (55% female; 28% non-Hispanic White; 32% Black; 27% Hispanic; 14% Other) recruited from an ongoing birth cohort study (Mean age = 16.7 years, SD = 0.358), was administered bi-weekly diaries over 52 weeks to prospectively record transitions in and out of romantic and sexual relationships and to assess links with positive affect (frequency of happiness) and negative affect (frequency of sadness). Relationship statuses considered included not only dating, but also liminal and asymmetrical statuses such as talking/flirting and crushes. Latent profile analyses revealed six relationship status trajectories, or love life profiles, based on the number of intra-year partners and on the extent of involvement in each of the relationship statuses. Approximately half of teens either were in stable dating relationships or uninvolved romantically during the year; however, half experienced variable levels of flux in their love lives. Relationship instability, not romantic involvement per se, was associated with higher levels of sadness and lower levels of happiness. Snapshots of teen romantic involvement based on one or two points in time obscure the extent of relationship heterogeneity and flux and how relationship status trajectories are associated with positive and negative affect., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Prior research has documented an association between adolescents' romantic experiences and poor emotional health. However, lack of intensive longitudinal measurement and an emphasis on negative affect have limited understanding about the extent to which adolescent relationship quality influences the emotional health of adolescents in partnerships, including the potential benefits of high-quality partnerships. Previous research has also been limited in its ability to account for factors that select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships. Using biweekly intensive longitudinal data from the mDiary Study of Adolescent Relationships linked to six waves of birth cohort data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this paper uses multilevel mixed-effects models to address three questions: (1) How are changes in partnership quality (defined as validation, frequency of disagreements, and global quality) associated with changes in both positive and negative affect; (2) Do observed associations persist net of factors that potentially select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships (e.g., childhood family experiences); and (3) Do associations between partnership quality and affect differ by gender? Results show that higher quality partnerships are associated with both decreases in negative affect and increases in positive affect. There were no significant gender differences on average. The study's findings highlight the importance of partnership quality as a key source of temporal variation in adolescents' emotional states.

Purpose: Brain monoamine vesicular transport disease is an infantile-onset movement disorder that mimics cerebral palsy. In 2013, the homozygous SLC18A2 variant, p.Pro387Leu, was first reported as a cause of this rare disorder, and dopamine agonists were efficient for treating affected individuals from a single large family. To date, only 6 variants have been reported. In this study, we evaluated genotype-phenotype correlations in individuals with biallelic SLC18A2 variants., Methods: A total of 42 affected individuals with homozygous SLC18A2 variant alleles were identified. We evaluated genotype-phenotype correlations and the missense variants in the affected individuals based on the structural modeling of rat VMAT2 encoded by Slc18a2, with cytoplasm- and lumen-facing conformations. A Caenorhabditis elegans model was created for functional studies., Results: A total of 19 homozygous SLC18A2 variants, including 3 recurrent variants, were identified using exome sequencing. The affected individuals typically showed global developmental delay, hypotonia, dystonia, oculogyric crisis, and autonomic nervous system involvement (temperature dysregulation/sweating, hypersalivation, and gastrointestinal dysmotility). Among the 58 affected individuals described to date, 16 (28%) died before the age of 13 years. Of the 17 patients with p.Pro237His, 9 died, whereas all 14 patients with p.Pro387Leu survived. Although a dopamine agonist mildly improved the disease symptoms in 18 of 21 patients (86%), some affected individuals with p.Ile43Phe and p.Pro387Leu showed milder phenotypes and presented prolonged survival even without treatment. The C. elegans model showed behavioral abnormalities., Conclusion: These data expand the phenotypic and genotypic spectra of SLC18A2-related disorders., (Copyright © 2022 American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Concerns about parenting adolescents are not new, but the rapid diffusion of digital technologies has heightened anxieties over digital parenting. Findings are decidedly mixed regarding the impact of digital technologies on adolescent well-being, and parents are left to navigate their concerns without an empirically based road map. A missing link for understanding the state of the science is a clear characterization of how digital parenting is measured, including an evaluation of which areas demand an outsized share of scientific attention and which have been overlooked. To address this gap, we undertook two interdisciplinary systematic reviews of the digital-parenting literature and characterized measurement across (a) quantitative surveys ( n = 145 studies) and (b) qualitative focus groups, interviews, codesign studies, and user studies ( n = 49). We describe previously popular areas of survey measurement that are of decreasing relevance to parenting of digital spaces (e.g., co-use, hovering). We likewise highlight areas that have been overlooked, including consideration of positive uses of digital technologies, acknowledgment of bidirectional influence, and attention to heterogeneity among families and to extraparental social ecologies of support and monitoring. We provide recommendations for the future of digital-parenting research and propose a more comprehensive approach to measuring how modern adolescents are parented.

Digital technology and social media platforms have transformed the ways adolescents communicate and cultivate romantic relationships, but few studies consider whether relationships initiated online are less salutary than those formed in person. A sample of 531 adolescents (Mean age = 16.7 years, SD = 0.358; 55% female) was recruited from an ongoing birth cohort study and administered bi-weekly diaries over a year to evaluate the circumstances associated with adolescents' romantic relationship formation and relationship quality. Two-thirds of respondents initiated one or more romantic relationships during the study, of which 15% were initiated online. Girls who did not fit in well at school and who had difficulty making friends were more likely to initiate romantic relationships online than their more sociable peers who fit in well at school; for boys, however, access to mobile devices increased the odds that romantic relationships were initiated online. The diaries captured considerable flux in the evolution of romantic relationships, but there was limited evidence that relationships initiated online involved greater risks, with the notable exception of greater age asymmetry., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)