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Individuals often vary in how they display signs and symptoms of personality disturbances and psychopathology. As such, comprehensive assessments of these signs and symptoms ought to capture how they manifest within and across time and contexts (e.g., community, home, work). Contexts may vary in the degree to which they influence personality and psychopathology concerns. Thus, practitioners and researchers often rely on multiple informants and methodologies to characterize intervention targets, monitor intervention progress, and inform the selection of evidence-based services. Across research teams and assessment domains, researchers commonly observe diverging outcomes among assessments, depending on the informant and/or method. We review theory and research that demonstrates how patterns of divergence observed in multi-informant, multi-method assessments represent valid individual differences in clinical presentations. This divergence may inform interpretations of personality and psychopathology functioning clinically, and we advance a research agenda to improve their use when assessing and diagnosing adult personality and psychopathology. [At time of submission to ERIC this chapter was in press with J. Mihura (Ed.), "The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Psychopathology Assessment." 2nd Edition. New York, NY: Oxford.]

Adolescents who experience social anxiety often display distressing fears that unfamiliar individuals evaluate their performance in social settings. These fears typically manifest as fears of negative evaluation (FNE) and/or fears of positive evaluation (FPE). Two well-established survey measures were originally developed to assess these evaluative fears in adults (Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale [BFNE]; Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale [FPES]), and recent work supports their psychometric properties when administered to adolescents and their parents. Yet, do these reports relate to how adolescents behave within anxiety-provoking social interactions germane to their clinical presentations, namely their interactions with unfamiliar peers? We tested this question in a mixed clinical/community sample of 105 adolescents and their parents. Both adolescents and parents completed reports about adolescents' fears on the BFNE and FPES. Further, trained independent observers rated adolescents' social anxiety and social skills during the Unfamiliar Peer Paradigm, a set of tasks designed to estimate how adolescents react to social interactions with unfamiliar peers. At the bivariate level, adolescents' BFNE and FPES reports related to observed social anxiety and social skills, whereas parents' FPES reports related to observed social anxiety. Further, both informants' FPES reports demonstrated incremental validity in relation to observed social anxiety, relative to the other informant. Compared to their BFNE reports, adolescents' FPES reports displayed incremental validity in relation to observed social skills; the reverse was not true for adolescents' BFNE reports. These findings have important implications for screening and treatment planning assessments when delivering services to adolescents experiencing social anxiety. [This paper was published in "Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment" v43 n1 p58-69 2021.]

Researchers often question the validity of multi-informant assessments among adolescents with child welfare involvement. Yet, within other clinical populations, prior research finds that multi-informant reports have a discernable structure characterized by discrete patterns of agreement and disagreement. This structure "tracks" contextual displays of behavior and clinical severity. We examined the structure of multi-informant reports (i.e., adolescent, caregiver, teacher) of adolescent externalizing and internalizing problems in a sample of adolescents with a history of child welfare involvement. Across problem domains and informants, reporting patterns mirrored those observed in other clinical populations, and displayed characteristics robustly present in meta-analytic work on cross-informant correspondence. Specifically, informants agreed more on reports of externalizing problems than internalizing problems and caregiver-teacher dyads agreed more than adolescent-caregiver dyads. Overall, we found robust, replicable patterns of multi-informant reports among child welfare involved adolescents. These reporting patterns may facilitate use and interpretation of multi-informant evidence-based assessments among this population. [This paper was published in "Child Psychiatry and Human Development" v52 n1 p49-62 2021.]

Clients display considerable variations in functioning across the contexts that encompass their social environments (e.g., home, school/workplace, peer interactions). No single measurement method can fully capture these variations. Yet, assessors must balance the need to accurately capture clients' clinical presentations, and at the same time attend to clinical feasibility when considering which measures to use. We describe one method--informants' subjective reports about clients' mental health--and highlight research and theory that connects scores on informants' reports with scores on non-subjective methods (e.g., observed behavior, performance-based tasks, official records). We also discuss issues in use and interpretation of informants' reports, provide recommendations for clinical assessments, and outline important directions for future research and practice. [This chapter will be published in: G. Asmundson (Ed.), "Comprehensive Clinical Psychology, 2nd ed." New York, NY: Elsevier.]

In 2010, the National Institute of Mental Health launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The RDoC seeks to enhance research on the "active ingredients" of mental health concerns, and conceptualizes these concerns as disorders of neural circuitry. A key focus of the RDoC involves understanding mental health across biopsychosocial domains that traverse traditional diagnostic categories, such as impairments in affect, cognition, regulatory systems, and social processing. The RDoC advanced a framework for understanding these impairments as they manifest across multiple "units of analysis": measured variables for which activity reflects functioning across biopsychosocial systems (e.g., subjective reports, behavioral performance, neural activity, cellular assays). However, scholars whose work focuses on children and adolescents encounter challenges with adopting the RDoC's units of analysis framework, which requires a developmental adaptation. In particular, 50 years of research points to a key reality: the RDoC's units of analysis will yield low correspondence, and this low correspondence will translate to inconsistent research findings. Yet, no guidelines exist for interpreting low correspondence among these units or integrating them for research purposes. Prior work on clinical assessments of children and adolescents points to theoretical and methodological models that facilitate interpreting and integrating multi-source assessments. In this introductory article to an RDoC-informed Special Section, we discuss how researchers might apply these models to interpreting and integrating the RDoC's units of analysis using a developmental perspective. This Special Section reveals new lines of RDoC-informed research, particularly the development of paradigms for "strategically" integrating activity from multiple units of analysis. [This paper was published in "Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology" v49 p279-296 May 2020.]

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."]

Assessing youth psychopathology involves collecting multiple informants' reports. Yet, multi-informant reports often disagree, necessitating integrative strategies that optimize predictive power. The "Trait" score approach leverages principal components analysis (PCA) to account for the context and perspective from which informants provide reports. This approach may boost the predictive power of multi-informant reports and thus warrants rigorous testing. We tested the "Trait" score approach using multi-informant reports of adolescent social anxiety in a mixed clinical/community sample of adolescents (n=127). The "Trait" score incrementally predicted observed social anxiety ([beta]s: 0.47-0.67) and referral status (ORs: 2.66-6.53), above-and-beyond individual informants' reports and a composite of informants' reports. The "Trait" score predicted observed behavior at magnitudes well above those typically observed for individual informants' reports of internalizing psychopathology (i.e., rs=0.01-0.15). Findings demonstrate the ability of the Trait score to improve prediction of clinical indices, and potentially transform widely used practices in multi-informant assessments. [This paper was published in "Clinical Psychological Science" v8 n6 p953-970 2020.]

Psychosocial functioning plays a key role in students' wellbeing and performance inside and outside of school. As such, techniques designed to measure and improve psychosocial functioning factor prominently in school-based service delivery and research. Given that the different contexts (e.g., school, home, community) in which students exist vary in the degree to which they influence psychosocial functioning, educators and researchers often rely on multiple informants to characterize intervention targets, monitor intervention progress, and inform the selection of evidence-based services. These informants include teachers, students, and parents. Across research teams, domains, and measurement methodologies, researchers commonly observe discrepancies among informants' reports. We review theory and research--occurring largely outside of school-based service delivery and research--that demonstrates how patterns of informant discrepancies represent meaningful differences that can inform our understanding of psychosocial functioning. In turn, we advance a research agenda to improve use and interpretation of informant discrepancies in school-based services and research. [This paper was published in "Journal of School Psychology" v74 p74-89 Jun 2019.]

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.]

When compared to one another, multiple informants' reports of adolescent internalizing problems often reveal low convergence. This creates challenges in the delivery of clinical services, particularly for severe outcomes linked to internalizing problems, namely suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Clinicians would benefit from methods that facilitate interpretation of multi-informant reports, particularly in inpatient settings typified by high-cost care and high-stakes decision-making. 765 adolescent inpatients (70.3% female; M[subscript age]=14.7) and their parents completed measures of adolescent internalizing problems. We obtained baseline clinical and treatment characteristics from electronic medical records. Latent class analyses revealed four reporting patterns: Parent-Adolescent Low (LL; 49.0%), Parent Low-Adolescent High (PL-AH; 11.5%), Parent High-Adolescent Low (PH-AL; 21.8%), Parent-Adolescent High (HH; 17.6%). Relative to the LL class, adolescents in the PH-AL and PL-AH classes were more likely to be admitted with suicidality. In terms of treatment characteristics and relative to the LL class, HH and PH-AL adolescents were more likely to receive standing antipsychotics, PH-AL adolescents were more likely to be in seclusion, and HH adolescents had longer hospital stays. At discharge and relative to the LL class, HH, PH-AL, and PL-AH adolescents were more likely to receive an anxiety disorder diagnosis. Further, HH, PH-AL, and PL-AH adolescents were more likely to receive partial hospitalization or care in another restrictive environment after inpatient treatment, relative to the LL class. This naturalistic study informs clinical decision-making by aiding our understanding of how multi-informant reports facilitate interpretations of adolescents' clinical presentations as well as predictions about treatment characteristics. [This is the in press version of an article published in the "Journal of Abnormal Child 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."]

Researchers strategically assess youth mental health by soliciting reports from multiple informants. Typically, these informants (e.g., parents, teachers, youth themselves) vary in the social contexts where they observe youth. Decades of research reveal that the most common data conditions produced with this approach consist of discrepancies across informants' reports (i.e., "informant discrepancies"). Researchers should arguably treat these informant discrepancies as "domain-relevant information": data relevant to understanding youth mental health domains (e.g., anxiety, depression, aggression). Yet, historically, in youth mental health research as in many other research areas, one set of paradigms has guided interpretations of informant discrepancies: "Converging Operations" and the "Multi-Trait Multi-Method Matrix" ("MTMM"). These paradigms (a) emphasize shared or "common variance" observed in multivariate data, and (b) inspire research practices that treat "unique variance" (i.e., informant discrepancies) as "measurement confounds," namely random error and/or rater biases. Several years ago, the Operations Triad Model emerged to address a conceptual problem that Converging Operations does not address: Some informant discrepancies might reflect measurement confounds, whereas others reflect domain-relevant information. However, addressing this problem requires more than a conceptual paradigm shift beyond Converging Operations. This problem necessitates a paradigm shift in "measurement validation." We advance a paradigm (Classifying Observations Necessitates Theory, Epistemology, and Testing [CONTEXT]) that addresses problems with using the MTMM in youth mental health research. CONTEXT optimizes measurement validity by guiding researchers to leverage (a) informants that produce domain-relevant informant discrepancies, (b) analytic procedures that retain domain-relevant informant discrepancies, and (c) study designs that facilitate detecting domain-relevant informant discrepancies. [This paper will be published in "Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology."]

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 5-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. [This paper will be published in "Psychological Assessment."

We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youth (Ns = 2119, 303, 592) for whom three informants reported on the youth's psychopathology (e.g., child, parent, teacher). Empirical support for the "p"-factor diminished in multi-informant models compared with mono-informant models: the correlation between externalizing and internalizing factors decreased and the general factor in bifactor models essentially reflected externalizing. Widely used MTMM-informed approaches for modeling multi-informant data cannot distinguish between competing interpretations of the patterns of effects we observed, including that the "p"-factor reflects, in part, evaluative consistency bias or that psychopathology manifests differently across contexts (e.g., home vs. school). Ultimately, support for the p-factor may be stronger in mono-informant designs, although it is does not entirely vanish in multi-informant models. Instead, the general factor of psychopathology in any given mono-informant model likely reflects a complex mix of variances, some substantive and some methodological. [This paper was published in "Clinical Psychological Science" v10 n4 p640-661 2022.]