Toward an optimized assessment of adolescent psychopathology risk: Multilevel environmental profiles and child irritability as predictors.

Background: Adolescence is a developmental period during which youth experience vulnerability to psychopathology. To build the foundation for a parsimonious psychopathology risk calculator while capturing the complexity and dynamic nature of the environment, the current study aimed to identify distinct risk and resilience profiles with a wide range of environmental factors guided by Bronfenbrenner's biopsychosocial ecological system theory. The association between the early-mid childhood risk profiles and psychopathology in adolescence were examined. Moreover, the predictive utility of early childhood irritability was evaluated in addition to the risk profiles. Methods: The data from Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study a nation-wide longitudinal study, were used in the latent profile analyses to identify the risk profiles with family, school, and neighborhood characteristics from 3 to 9 years old. To capture the socio-environmental and cultural nuances, we extracted three subsamples, including Black/African American (n = 2587), Hispanic/Latinx (n = 1577), and White (n = 776) for separate analyses. Risk profile memberships were used to predict adolescence psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, attention deficits, oppositional defiant disorder, and conduct disorder symptoms. The predictive utility of early childhood irritability above and beyond environmental risk profiles was evaluated using stepwise regression. Results: Three risk profiles were identified in the Hispanic/Latinx and Black/African American subsamples, while four profiles were identified in White subsample. Almost all risk profile membership predicted both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, while some profiles are predictive of externalizing symptoms only. Higher level of irritability predicted higher symptomatology in all five mental health outcomes above and beyond the environmental profiles. Conclusions: Distinct risk and resilience profiles primarily driven by parent and family characteristics were identified for all three major race/ethnicity groups. Our findings lay the foundation for a more efficient multi-tiered information gathering process in mental health clinical settings to aid the decision making for intervention and prevention.

ASL Developmental Trends Among Deaf Children, Ages Birth to Five.

Language development is an important facet of early life. Deaf children may have exposure to various languages and communication modalities, including spoken and visual. Previous research has documented the rate of growth of English skills among young deaf children, but no studies have investigated the rate of ASL acquisition. The current paper examines young deaf children's acquisition of ASL skills, the rate of growth over time, and factors impacting levels and growth rates. Seventy-three children ages birth to 5 were rated three times using the Visual Communication and Sign Language Checklist and given a scaled score at each rating. An average monthly gain score was calculated for each participant. The presence of a deaf parent, use of ASL at home, use of cochlear implant(s), whether the child was born deaf, and age of initial diagnosis were analyzed for their impact on the level of ASL skill and rate of growth. Results indicated that the use of ASL in the home has a significant positive effect on deaf children's ASL skill level. Additionally, children with lower initial ratings showed higher rates of growth than those with higher initial ratings, especially among school-aged children. The paper discusses implications and directions for future studies.

Neural mechanisms of reward processing in adolescent irritability.

Irritability is impairing and prevalent across pediatric psychiatric disorders and typical development, yet its neural mechanisms are largely unknown. This study evaluated the relation between adolescent irritability and reward-related brain function as a candidate neural mechanism. Adolescents from intervention-seeking families in the community (N = 52; mean age = 13.80, SD = 1.94) completed a monetary incentive delay task to assess reward anticipation and feedback (reward receipt and omission) during fMRI acquisition. Whole-brain analyses, controlling for age, examined brain activation and striatal and amygdala connectivity in relation to irritability. Irritability was measured using the parent- and youth-reported Affective Reactivity Index. Irritability was associated with altered reward processing-related activation and connectivity in multiple networks during reward anticipation and feedback, including increased striatal activation and altered ventral striatum connectivity with prefrontal areas. Our findings suggest that irritability is associated with altered neural patterns during reward processing and that aberrant prefrontal cortex-mediated top-down control may be related to irritability. These findings inform our understanding of the etiology of youth irritability and the development of mechanism-based interventions.

Executive functioning moderates neural reward processing in youth.

Although executive functioning has traditionally been studied in "cool" settings removed from emotional contexts, it is highly relevant in "hot" emotionally salient settings such as reward processing. Furthermore, brain structures related to "cool" executive functioning and "hot" reward-related processes develop simultaneously, yet little is known about how executive functioning modulates neural processes related to reward processing during adolescence, a period of time when these systems are still developing. The present study examined how performance on "cool" behavioral executive functioning measures moderates neural reward processing. Youths (N = 43, Mage = 13.74 years, SD = 1.81 years) completed a child-friendly monetary incentive delay task during fMRI acquisition that captures neural responses to reward anticipation and to reward receipt and omission. Performance on inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility measures, captured outside the scanner, was used to predict brain activation and seed-based connectivity (ventral striatum and amygdala). Across analyses, we found that executive functioning moderated youths' neural responses during both reward anticipation and performance feedback, predominantly with respect to amygdala connectivity with prefrontal/frontal and temporal structures, supporting previous theoretical models of brain development during adolescence. Overall, youths with worse executive functioning had more pronounced differences in neural activation and connectivity between task conditions compared with youths with better executive functioning. This study contributes to elucidating the relationship between "cool" and "hot" processes and our findings demonstrate that simple executive functioning skills moderate more complex processes that involve incorporation of numerous skills in an emotionally salient context, such as reward processing.

Evaluating physicochemical properties of crude oil as indicators of low-salinity-induced wettability alteration in carbonate minerals.

The injection of low-salinity brine enhances oil recovery by altering the mineral wettability in carbonate reservoirs. However, the reported effectiveness of low-salinity water varies significantly in the literature, and the underlying mechanism of wettability alteration is controversial. In this work, we investigate the relationships between characteristics of crude oils and the oils' response to low-salinity water in a spontaneous imbibition test, aiming (1) to identify suitable indicators of the effectiveness of low-salinity water and (2) to evaluate possible mechanisms of low-salinity-induced wettability alteration, including rock/oil charge repulsion and microdispersion formation. Seven oils are tested by spontaneous imbibition and fully characterized in terms of their acidity, zeta potential, interfacial tension, microdispersion propensity, water-soluble organics content and saturate-aromatic-resin-asphaltene fractionation. For the first time, the effectiveness of low-salinity water is found to positively correlate with the oil interfacial tension in low-salinity water. Oils with higher interfacial activity are found to respond more positively to low-salinity water. Moreover, cryogenic transmission electron microscopy images suggest that microdispersion is essentially macroemulsion, and its formation is an effective indicator - but not the root cause - of wettability alteration. The repulsive zeta potential for the rock and the oil in low-salinity water is found to be an insufficient condition for wettability alteration in carbonate minerals.