Refugees experience a greater rate of common mental disorders relative to most other populations, and there remains a need to address these needs. However, most refugees are hosted in low-and-middle-income countries, where there is a lack of resources and mental health providers who can deliver mainstream mental health services. This situation has led to the emergence of scalable mental health interventions that can deliver evidence-based programs to refugees in need. Many countries hosting refugees have implemented programs that train local lay providers in interventions that can be delivered at scale. This review provides a narrative overview of these scalable interventions and critiques the evidence for their efficacy. It is noted that there are limitations to currently available scalable interventions, and there is a need for greater attention to determining the longer-term benefits of interventions, addressing the mental health needs of refugees who do not respond to these interventions, assisting refugees with more severe psychological disorders, and understanding the specific mechanisms that underpin observed benefits of these interventions.

Effectiveness of psychodynamic therapy for adolescents in reducing internalizing and externalizing psychopathology was determined by comparing treated adolescents (86 sessions) with the normative developmental progression in two groups without treatment: healthy and diabetic adolescents. In a three-wave longitudinal study, n = 531 adolescents (n = 303 patients, n = 119 healthy, n = 109 diabetics) and their mothers filled out psychopathology questionnaires (Youth Self-Report and Child Behavior Checklist). Latent growth curve modeling and multilevel modeling were used to analyze and compare within-person symptoms changes across groups. Analyses showed a significant reduction over the course of treatment for internalizing (Cohen’s d = .90–.92) and externalizing (d = .58–.72) symptoms, also when the developmental progression of both control groups was accounted for (d = .48–.76). Mothers reported lower levels than their children in internalizing symptoms (p ≤ .01) while this discrepancy increased over time for treated adolescents (p = .02). Results established the effectiveness of psychodynamic treatment for adolescents both with externalizing and internalizing symptoms in comparison with growth and change in nonclinical samples. Cross-informant differences and age-specific trajectories require attention in psychotherapy treatment and research.

Researchers have taken great interest in the assessment of text readability. This study expands on this research by developing readability models that predict the processing effort involved during first language (L1) and second language (L2) text reading. Employing natural language processing tools, the study focused on assessing complex linguistic features of texts, and these features were used to explain the variance in processing effort, as evidenced by eye movement data for L1 or L2 readers of English that were extracted from an open eye-tracking corpus. Results indicated that regression models using the indices of complex linguistic features provided better performance in predicting processing effort for both L1 and L2 reading than the models using simple linguistic features (word and sentence length). Furthermore, many of the predictive variables were lexical features for both L1 and L2 reading, emphasizing the importance of decoding for fluent reading regardless of the language used.

While many studies have identified risk and protective factors of substance use (SU), few have assessed the reciprocal associations of child conduct problems (CP) and parenting practices and behaviors in the prediction of SU across development. A greater understanding of how these factors relate over time is needed to improve the timing of targeted prevention efforts. This study examined how child CP, parenting behaviors, and parents’ own antisocial behavior relate from preschool to adolescence and eventuate in SU. Participants included 706 youth (70.6% male; 89.7% white) enrolled in the Michigan Longitudinal Study. Data from waves 1 (ages 3–5), 2 (ages 6–8), 3 (ages 9–11), 4 (ages 12–14), and 5 (ages 15–17) were included. A random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) examined reciprocal associations between parenting practices, parents’ antisocial behavior, and child CP over time (waves 1–4) and how these factors contribute to adolescent alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use (wave 5). At the within-person level, negative parenting and parents’ own antisocial behavior had a strong influence in late childhood/early adolescence. Only child CP emerged as a significant predictor of SU. Results highlight the importance of early intervention and the potential influence of parenting and child factors throughout development in the prevention of SU.

This paper explores the link between the metaphoric structure TIME IS SPACE and time perception in bilinguals. While there appear to be fundamental commonalities in the way humans perceive and experience time regardless of language background, language-specific spatiotemporal metaphors can give rise to differences between populations, under certain conditions. Little is known, however, about how bilinguals experience time, and the specific factors that may modulate bilingual temporal processing. Here, we address this gap by examining L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals in a psychophysical task. Results show that duration estimation of dynamic spatial configurations analogous to L2-specific temporal metaphors is modulated by L2 proficiency. In contrast, duration estimation of spatial configurations analogous to the L1 metaphorical expressions appears to be modulated by the age of L2 acquisition. These findings are discussed in terms of associative learning and cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind.

Belief change is an important element of much CBT, yet very little consideration has been given to the theories of knowledge, the epistemology, which underlie this process. This article argues that understanding the epistemic basis of the techniques therapists use can help guide their choice of interventions. The empirical evidence for cognitive restructuring is considered, the importance of distancing and decentring noted, and three epistemic styles are identified: the rational-empiricist, pragmatist and ‘constructivist’ approaches. Different schools of CBT emphasise one or more of these. The article describes how these epistemes can be used to make decisions about which cognitive interventions to use, particularly when clients may be sceptical about reality testing because of entrenched beliefs or real-life adversity.

Children who have experienced maltreatment are more likely to have disrupted attachments, fewer psychosocial strengths, and poorer long-term psychosocial outcomes. However, few studies have examined the interplay between attachment security and psychosocial strengths among children involved in therapeutic services in the context of the child welfare system. The present longitudinal study examines the insecure attachment behaviors and psychosocial strengths of 555 children referred to the Therapeutic Family Care program (TFCP) in Cobourg, Ontario between 2000 and 2019. The children were assessed by their caregivers on a regular basis using the Assessment Checklist for Children (ACC) and the complementary strengths-focused ACC+ measure. Average age of children at baseline was 9.57 years (SD = 3.51) and 229 (41.26%) were female. We conducted growth curve and random intercepts cross-lagged panel models to test the longitudinal interplay between insecure attachment behaviors and strengths. Results suggest that females’ attachment security improved, males’ attachment security worsened, and both males and females developed strengths over time. Further, analyses revealed a directional effect, whereby fewer insecure attachment behaviors predicted more psychosocial strengths approximately 6 months later. Implications for attachment-oriented and strengths-based services in the context of child welfare are discussed.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex mental health condition often associated with previous childhood adversity including maladaptive parenting. When becoming a parent themselves, mothers with BPD have difficulties with various parenting cognitions and practices, but unknown is whether they have appropriate knowledge of sensitive parenting. This study explored whether differences in parenting knowledge or self-efficacy are specific to BPD or also found in mothers with depression, and whether symptom severity or specific diagnosis better explain parenting perceptions. Mothers with BPD (n = 26), depression (n = 25) or HCs (n = 25) completed a Q-sort parenting knowledge task and a parenting self-efficacy questionnaire. Results showed mothers with BPD had the same knowledge of sensitive parenting behaviors as mothers with depression and healthy mothers. Self-reported parenting self-efficacy was lower in mothers with BPD and depression compared with healthy mothers, with symptom severity most strongly associated. A significant but low correlation was found between parenting self-efficacy and knowledge. Findings suggest that mothers with BPD and depression know what good parenting is but think they are not parenting well. Mental health difficulties are not associated with parenting knowledge, but symptom severity appears to be a common pathway to lower parenting self-efficacy. Future interventions should test whether reduction of symptom severity or positive parenting feedback could improve parenting self-efficacy.

Large individual differences in language skills are well documented in monolingual children (e.g., Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018). In bilinguals, the broad variation is even more pronounced. Interestingly, some bilingual children might be weak in their Heritage Language (HL, also labeled as Minority Language, Home Language, Community Language), to which they have naturalistic exposure from birth. Others might be weak in their Societal Language (SL), the language of the surrounding and educational environment. Large individual differences are observed in neurotypical bilingually exposed children as well as in their bilingually raised peers with developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and hearing impairment (see also Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2016; Meir & Novogrodsky, 2020). Figure 1 visualizes individual differences in morphosyntactic skills of monolingual and bilingual children with typical language development aged 5;5–6;8 as indexed by the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks (the data are drawn from Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2016; Meir, 2018). While monolingual preschool children (MonoRU and MonoHE) show little variation, bilinguals with different levels of dominance (balanced bilinguals: BB; HL dominant: HL-D; SL dominant: SL-D) as determined by standardized tests exhibit large individual differences within each language and across their two languages.

Early adolescence is a vulnerable period for emotional distress. Both emotion regulation and social connection to peers and family adults are understood to be associated with distress. However, existing longitudinal work has not explored these constructs jointly in a way that estimates their reciprocal relationships over adolescence. We present a three-wave random-intercepts cross-lagged panel model of reciprocal relationships between emotional distress, perceived emotion regulation, and social connections during early adolescence, among 15,864 participants from education settings in disadvantaged areas of England, over three annual waves (at ages 11/12, 12/13, and 13/14 years). Findings showed that emotional distress and perceived emotion regulation share a negative relationship over time, and that higher perceived emotion regulation predicts greater family connection in the initial stages of early adolescence (from age 11–12 to 12–13 years). Findings also indicated that connection to peers is positively associated with family connection, but also positively predicts slightly greater distress in the later stages of early adolescence (from age 12–13 to 13–14 years). Findings indicate a risk of negative spiral between emotional distress and perceived emotion regulation in early adolescence, and that social connection may not necessarily play the role we might expect in reducing distress.

This study investigated the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) coordination in response to emotion in girls’ and boys’ development of relational (e.g., ignoring, excluding) and physical (e.g., hitting, kicking) aggression. Caregivers reported on children’s relational and physical aggression at ages 6, 7, 8, and 10 years (N = 232, 50.4% girls, 46.6% Latinx). Sympathetic nervous system (assessed via pre-ejection period) and parasympathetic nervous system (assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia) reactivity were measured in response to video clips depicting fear, happiness, and sadness at age 7. Growth curve models indicated that ANS reactivity to sadness, but not to fear or happiness, was related to trajectories of relational aggression. In contrast, ANS reactivity to all three emotions was associated with trajectories of physical aggression. Effects differed across genders, indicating that distinct patterns of ANS reactivity to emotion may be involved in girls’ and boys’ development of aggression. Overall, these findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the role of ANS reactivity to emotion in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study considers ANS reactivity to specific emotions, as related to both relational and physical aggression, and as differentially expressed among girls versus boys.

Pregnancy is a time of increased vulnerability to psychopathology, yet limited work has investigated the extent to which variation in psychopathology during pregnancy is shared and unshared across syndromes and symptoms. Understanding the structure of psychopathology during pregnancy, including associations with childhood experiences, may elucidate risk and resilience factors that are transdiagnostic and/or specific to particular psychopathology phenotypes. Participants were 292 pregnant individuals assessed using multiple measures of psychopathology. Confirmatory factor analyses found evidence for a structure of psychopathology consistent with the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP). A common transdiagnostic factor accounted for most variation in psychopathology, and both adverse and benevolent childhood experiences (ACEs and BCEs) were associated with this transdiagnostic factor. Furthermore, pregnancy-specific anxiety symptoms most closely reflected the dimension of Fear, which may suggest shared variation with manifestations of fear that are not pregnancy-specific. ACEs and BCEs also linked to specific prenatal psychopathology involving thought problems, detachment, and internalizing, externalizing, antagonistic, and antisocial behavior. These findings extend the dimensional and hierarchical HiTOP model to pregnant individuals and show how maternal childhood risk and resilience factors relate to common and specific forms of psychopathology during pregnancy as a period of enhanced vulnerability.

Youth with legal system involvement are especially likely to experience parental harshness (PH) and exposure to community violence (ETV), two common forms of life stress. However, most studies examine these stressors separately or collapse across them in ways that preclude examination of their co-occurrence. Consequently, it is unclear 1) how PH and ETV simultaneously fluctuate across development and 2) how these fluctuations predict future mental health problems in legal system-involved youth. We used group-based multi-trajectory modeling to estimate simultaneous trajectories of PH and ETV in 1027 legal system-involved youth and regression analyses to understand how trajectory membership predicted mental health problems three years later. Four trajectories of co-occurrence were identified (1: Low; 2: Moderate and Decreasing; 3: Moderate PH/High ETV; 4: High PH/Moderate ETV). Compared to the Low trajectory, all trajectories with PH/ETV elevations predicted violent crime and substance problems; trajectory 3 (Moderate PH/High ETV) predicted nonviolent crime and depression/anxiety symptoms; trajectory 4 (High PH/Moderate ETV) predicted depression diagnosis. These results elucidate how PH and ETV typically co-occur across adolescence for legal system-involved youth. They also reveal important commonalities and dissociations among types of mental health problems.

This study examines the relative influence of environmental contexts (family, school, neighborhood) on child behavioral health at ages 3, 5, 9, and 15 years. Path analysis was conducted on a sample of 4,898 urban children from a longitudinal dataset called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Child physical abuse, emotional abuse, maternal depression, substance use, neighborhood social cohesion, neighborhood poverty, school connectedness, and peer bullying had concurrent relationships with child behavior problems at one or more developmental stages. Early childhood abuse (age 3) and school age environmental contexts (age 9) had lasting effects on later behavior problems. Findings underscore the importance of both multilevel contextual factors and developmental timing in determining behavioral health outcomes in children.

The transition to college is a time of increased opportunity and stress spanning multiple domains. Adolescents who encounter significant stress during this transition may be vulnerable to adverse outcomes due to a “wear and tear” of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis. Latino/a students may be particularly at-risk for heightened stress exposure due to experiences of both minority-specific and general life stress. Despite this, little is known regarding the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on Latino/a students’ HPA axis functioning. The present study employed a “multi-risk model” approach to examine additive, common, and cumulative effects of multiple stress forms (general, academic, social, financial, bicultural, ethnic/racial discrimination) on diurnal cortisol in a sample of first-year Latino/a college students (N = 196; 64.4% female; Mage = 18.95). Results indicated that no stress forms were additively associated with the cortisol awakening response (CAR), but general stress was associated with a flatter diurnal cortisol slope (DCS) and bicultural stress was linked with a steeper DCS. A college stress latent factor was associated with a lower CAR, whereas a latent factor of discrimination was not associated with diurnal cortisol. Cumulative risk was linked with a lower CAR. Findings highlight the physiological correlates of various stressors experienced by Latino/a college students.