The Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth: Psychometric properties of the teacher version and evidence of contextual variability in psychosocial impairments.

Effective mental health services require accurate assessment of psychosocial impairments linked to mental health concerns. Youth who experience these impairments do so within and across various contexts (e.g., school, home). Youth may display symptoms of mental health concerns without co-occurring impairments, and vice versa. Yet, nearly all impairment measures presume that those assessed display mental health concerns. Consequently, we recently developed youth and parent versions of a five-item measure of youth psychosocial impairments (i.e., Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth [WSASY]), structured to assess any youth, regardless of mental health status. Across two studies, we developed and tested a WSASY teacher version, in a large sample of 382 student teacher reports (Study 1), and a subsample of 66 youth who, along with their parents and teachers, completed the WSASY and a series of school- and home-based behavioral tasks (Study 2). In Study 1, WSASY teacher reports demonstrated excellent internal consistency and unique relations with teacher reports on well-established measures of psychosocial strengths and difficulties. In Study 2, teacher, youth, and parent WSASY reports demonstrated low correspondence with each other and context-specific relations with criterion variables. This low correspondence allowed us to capitalize on an integrative approach designed to optimize informant-specific variance. Integrative scores demonstrated robust, large-magnitude relations with criterion variables across multiple information sources. These findings provide important psychometric support for use of WSASY teacher reports, and pave the way toward integrating WSASY reports from multiple informants who observe youth psychosocial impairments within different contexts and from different perspectives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A Paradigm for Understanding Adolescent Social Anxiety with Unfamiliar Peers: Conceptual Foundations and Directions for Future Research.

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.

The Work and Social Adjustment Scale for Youth: A Measure for Assessing Youth Psychosocial Impairment Regardless of Mental Health Status.

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.

Multi-Informant Assessments of Adolescent Social Anxiety: Adding Clarity by Leveraging Reports from Unfamiliar Peer Confederates.

Adolescent social anxiety (SA) assessments often include adolescent and parent reports, and low reporting correspondence results in uncertainties in clinical decision-making. Adolescents display SA within non-home contexts such as peer interactions. Yet, current methods for collecting peer reports raise confidentiality concerns, though adolescent SA assessments nonetheless would benefit from context-specific reports relevant to adolescent SA (i.e., interactions with unfamiliar peers). In a sample of 89 adolescents (30 Evaluation-Seeking; 59 Community Control), we collected SA reports from adolescents and their parents, and SA reports from unfamiliar peer confederates who interacted with adolescents during 20-minute mock social interactions. Adolescents and parents completed reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and related concerns (e.g., depressive symptoms), and adolescents completed self-reports of state arousal within mock social interactions. Adolescents' SA reports correlated with reports on parallel measures from parents in the .30s and with peer confederates in the .40s to .50s, whereas reports from parent-confederate dyads correlated in the .07 to .22 range. Adolescent, parent, and peer confederate SA reports related to reports on trait measures of adolescent SA and depressive symptoms, and distinguished Evaluation-Seeking from Community Control Adolescents. Confederates' SA reports incrementally predicted adolescents' self-reported SA over and above parent reports, and vice versa, with combined Rs ranging from .51 to .60. These combined Rs approximate typical correspondence levels between informants who observe adolescents in the same context (e.g., mother-father). Adolescent and peer confederate (but not parent) SA reports predicted adolescents' state arousal in social interactions. These findings have implications for clarifying patterns of reporting correspondence in clinical assessments of adolescent SA.

Convergent, incremental, and criterion-related validity of multi-informant assessments of adolescents' fears of negative and positive evaluation.

Adolescents who experience social anxiety tend to hold fears about negative evaluations (e.g., taunting) and may also hold fears about positive evaluations (e.g., praise from a teacher). The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (BFNE) scale and Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (FPES) are 2 widely used measures of adults' evaluative concerns. Yet we know little about their psychometric properties when assessing adolescents. In a mixed clinical/community sample of 96 adolescents (66.7% female; M = 14.50 years, SD = 0.50; 63.3% African American), we examined both self-report and parent report versions of the BFNE and FPES. Adolescents and parents also provided reports about adolescents on survey measures of social anxiety and depressive symptoms. Adolescents participated in multiple social interactions in which they self-reported their state arousal before and during the tasks. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports distinguished adolescents who displayed elevated social anxiety from those who did not. Both informants' reports related to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, when accounting for domains that commonly co-occur with social anxiety (i.e., depressive symptoms). Further, both the BFNE and FPES displayed incremental validity in relation to survey measures of adolescent social anxiety, relative to each other. However, only adolescents' BFNE and FPES reports predicted adolescents' self-reported arousal within social interactions, and only adolescents' FPES displayed incremental validity in predicting self-reported arousal, relative to their BFNE. Adolescent and parent BFNE and FPES reports display convergent validity and in some cases incremental and criterion-related validity. These findings have important implications for evidence-based assessments of adolescents' evaluative concerns.