Faculty Bibliography

Adolescent depression is a serious and debilitating disorder associated with lifelong negative outcomes, including heightened risk for recurrence into adulthood, psychiatric comorbidities, and suicide. Among evidence-based treatments for adolescents, psychotherapies for depression have the smallest effect sizes of all psychiatric conditions studied. Advancing care for depression in adolescents is complex due to the heterogeneity in etiology and co-occurring difficulties among youth presenting with depression symptoms. This and a companion paper (Lewandowski et al., 2022) draw on a recent multisite collaboration that focused on implementing depression treatment for adolescents within clinical and research contexts. Specifically, this paper will review our work adapting behavioral activation (BA) as a principle-based framework to improve effectiveness and efficiency of depression treatment used within clinical and research settings in academic medical centers. Piloted adaptations include the use of BA principles to address idiographic drivers of depression and in-session BA "exposures" to illustrate BA principles. Case vignettes illustrate these adaptations of BA to address adolescent depression in the context of co-occurring difficulties.

Previous research has examined how mood affects individuals"™ judgment. Our study aims to extend this research to evaluate the influence of mood on judgment in vivo. Using a smartphone-based design, we prompted participants (N = 103) three times a day to rate their mood and perform one of three judgment tasks three times a day for one week: (1) evaluate their self-efficacy on a word unscrambling task, (2) identify face emotions, or (3) judge risk by pumping virtual balloons. Our results showed that, contrary to our hypotheses, mood did not have a significant effect on the judgments individuals made. Prior task performance and task trial were significant predictors of self-efficacy; sex and task trial were associated with face emotion recognition; and balloons popped the day prior, and task trial influenced how individuals evaluated risk. The in vivo design of this study is a novel and more ecologically valid than some earlier work, but it is not without limitations, including the self-reported nature of mood, and potential for unmeasured third variable effects. This research raises questions about the validity of lab-based studies of the relation between mood and judgment, and shows the capacity of in vivo research and technology to challenge and enhance our understanding of how mood influences behavior.

Despite an increased focus on trauma-informed care within the juvenile justice system, we still know very little about the impact of trauma on juvenile justice professionals or their perceptions of trauma-informed interventions. To fill this gap, this study used an organizational assessment to examine perceptions of trauma-informed care among juvenile professionals in a juvenile detention setting. Participants included 204 staff members in two secure juvenile detention facilities. Staff who reported greater availability of trauma-informed practices were more likely to perceive that youth and families felt safe and those who reported that the facility was taking steps to address secondary trauma were more likely to report a sense of staff safety. Regarding individual factors, only age and gender were related to perceptions of youth and family safety. Frontline staff were more likely than supervisory staff to feel they had received adequate training in trauma and had the skills necessary to deescalate youth. These findings suggest that staff are open to trauma-informed practices in juvenile detention, but a greater focus on supervisory staff is needed. Shifting from individual-level strategies to facility-level improvements could have a greater impact on enhancing staff members"™ perceptions of safety, which improves their ability to care for youth.

As the outgoing editor-in-chief of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, I offer my reflections upon the seventy-fifth volume as I look back at the inception of the series in 1945, and my impressions about then and now. While there are most certainly remarkable differences in the zeitgeist, both in terms of culture, the larger social polity, and shifts in psychoanalytic interests, there are also similarities between these two eras which link them in surprising ways.