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Adolescents who experience social anxiety concerns often display symptoms and impairments when interacting with unfamiliar peers. For adolescent clients, reducing symptoms and impairments within these interactions comprises a key treatment target within exposure-based therapies for social anxiety. Recent work on mechanisms of change in exposure-based therapies highlights the need for therapeutic exposures to simulate real world manifestations of anxiety-provoking social situations. Yet, researchers encounter difficulty with gathering ecologically valid data about social interactions with unfamiliar peers. The lack of these data inhibits building an evidence base for understanding, assessing, and treating adolescent clients whose concerns manifest within these social interactions. Consequently, we developed a paradigm for understanding adolescent social anxiety within social interactions with unfamiliar peers. In this paradigm, we train peer confederates to interact with adolescents as if they were a same-age peer, within a battery of social interaction tasks that mimic key characteristics of therapeutic exposures. Leveraging experimental psychopathology and multi-modal assessment approaches, this paradigm allows for understanding core components of social interactions with unfamiliar peers relevant to exposure-based therapy, including stimuli variability, habituation, expectancy violations, peers' impressions about socially anxious adolescents, and maladaptive coping strategies that inhibit learning from exposures (e.g., safety behaviors). We detail the conceptual and empirical foundations of this paradigm, highlight important directions for future research, and report "proof of concept" data supporting these research directions. The Unfamiliar Peer Paradigm opens new doors for building a basic science that informs evidence-based services for social anxiety, within clinically-relevant contexts in adolescents' social worlds. [This paper was published in "Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review."]

Among individuals experiencing internalizing psychopathology, high levels of emotion reactivity--the degree to which they experience emotions strongly or intensely, over extended periods of time, and as elicited by a variety of stimuli--increase risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Researchers developed the Emotion Reactivity Scale (ERS) to assess emotion reactivity, with psychometric support for the measure largely restricted to at-risk clinical populations. We know little of the psychometric properties of the ERS when administered as a screening measure in community assessments. In a study of the psychometric properties of the ERS in a non-clinical assessment of adults, we recruited 105 participants (M[subscript age]=44.6; 82.9% female) as part of a larger study of adolescent social anxiety and family relationships. Participants completed the ERS, self-report measures of various psychosocial domains, and an impromptu speech task, before and during which they self-reported their arousal. Scores taken from the ERS demonstrated strong internal consistency and demonstrated facets of validity: (a) positive relations with measures of internalizing psychopathology and parent-adolescent conflict, and negative relations with a measure of quality of life (convergent validity); (b) relations with self-reported anxiety and safety-seeking behaviors, over-and-above self-reported depressive symptoms (incremental validity); and (c) relation with self-reported state arousal during the impromptu speech task, over-and-above self-reported arousal at baseline (criterion-related validity). These findings support the psychometric properties of the ERS when administered in non-clinic assessments of adults. As such, they have important implications for screening assessments designed to identify adults who display the potential for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. [This paper was published in "Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment" v41 p730-740 2019.]

Objectives: Socially anxious adolescents often display fears of negative evaluation (FNE) and fears of positive evaluation (FPE). The Bivalent Fear of Evaluation model posits that FNE and FPE represent two poles of socio-evaluative fears, and that individuals may simultaneously display high levels of FNE and FPE (high FNE/FPE). To what degree do adolescents who display high FNE/FPE differ in psychosocial functioning from adolescents who display high concerns on one domain and not the other (either high FNE/low FPE, or low FNE/high FPE), or low concerns on both domains (i.e., low FNE/FPE)? We tested this broader question (a) across multiple psychosocial domains, (b) using multiple informants' reports to identify adolescents' patterns of socio-evaluative fears, and (c) in relation to adolescents' reactions to anxiety-provoking social situations with unfamiliar peers. Methods: One-hundred twenty-seven 14-15-year-old adolescents and their parents completed measures of adolescents' FNE, FPE, and domains of psychosocial functioning (i.e., social anxiety, safety behaviors, depressive symptoms, psychosocial impairments). Adolescents participated in several social interaction tasks with unfamiliar peers. Adolescents self-reported on their arousal during these tasks and the unfamiliar peers with whom they interacted completed measures of social anxiety about the adolescent. Results: High FNE/FPE adolescents tended to display poorer psychosocial functioning relative to adolescents who displayed other patterns of socio-evaluative fears. Based on adolescent-classified groups, high FNE/FPE adolescents displayed greater self-reported arousal during social interactions, relative to the other groups. Conclusions: Identifying adolescents' patterns of socio-evaluative fears may inform interpretations of the individual differences among adolescents' clinical presentations of social anxiety. [This paper was published in "Journal of Child and Family Studies" v28 p3360-3373 2019.]

Attempts to understand "subjectivity" have historically involved distinguishing the strengths of subjective methods (e.g., survey ratings from informants) from those of alternative methods (e.g., observational/performance-based tasks). Yet, a movement is underway in Psychology that considers the merits of "intersubjectivity": Understanding the space between two or more informant's subjective impressions of a common person or phenomenon. In mental health research, understanding differences between subjective impressions has less to do with informants' characteristics and more to do with the social environments or contexts germane to the people or phenomena examined. Our paper focuses on one relatively understudied social environment: the cultural context. We draw from seminal work on "psychological universals", as well as emerging work on cultural norms (i.e., "cultural tightness") to understand intersubjectivity effects through a cross-cultural lens. We report a meta-analysis of 314 studies of intersubjectivity effects in mental health, revealing that (a) this work involves independent research teams in over 30 countries, (b) informants rating a target person's mental health (e.g., parent and teacher ratings of a child's behavior) commonly provide diverging estimates of that person's mental health, and (c) greater convergence between subjective reports relates to a "tighter" or more norms-bound culture. Our paper illustrates strategies for understanding divergence between subjective reports. In particular, we highlight theoretical and methodological frameworks for examining patterns of divergence between subjective reports in relation to data from nonsubjective methods. We also describe how research on intersubjectivity informs efforts to improve the interpretability of subjective assessments in multiple sub-disciplines in Psychology. [This paper will be published in "Review of General Psychology."]

A key component of delivering mental health services involves evaluating psychosocial impairments linked to mental health concerns. Youth may experience these impairments in various ways (e.g., dysfunctional family and/or peer relationships, poor school performance). Importantly, youth may display symptoms of mental illness without co-occurring psychosocial impairments, and the reverse may be true. However, all available instruments for assessing youth psychosocial impairments presume the presence of mental health concerns among those assessed. Consequently, key gaps exist in knowledge about the developmental psychopathology of psychosocial impairments; and thus how to understand impairments in the context of youth mental health. To address these issues we developed a modified version of a 5-item measure of adult psychosocial impairments (i.e., Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth [WSASY]) and tested its psychometric properties. A mixed clinical/community sample of adolescents and parents completed parallel versions of the WSASY, along with a multi-domain, multi-method battery of measures of adolescent internalizing and externalizing concerns, parent psychosocial functioning, adolescent-parent conflict, adolescent peer functioning, and observed social skills. On both versions of the WSASY, increased scores related to increased adolescent mental health concerns, adolescent-parent conflict, parent psychosocial dysfunction, and peer-related impairments. WSASY scores also distinguished adolescents who displayed co-occurring mental health concerns from those who did not, and related to observed social skills deficits within social interactions with unfamiliar peers. The WSASY opens doors to new areas of inquiry regarding the developmental psychopathology of impairment, including questions regarding the onset of impairments and their links to mental health. [This is the advance online version of a paper published in "Journal of Child and Family Studies."]