Neighborhood Moderation of Sensation Seeking Effects on Adolescent Substance Use Initiation

Adolescent substance use carries a considerable public health burden, and early initiation into use is especially problematic. Research has shown that trait sensation seeking increases risk for substance use initiation, but less is known about contextual factors that can potentially unmask this risk. This study utilized a diverse longitudinal subsample of youth (N?=?454) from a larger study of familial alcoholism (53.1% female, 61% non-Hispanic Caucasian, 27.8% Hispanic, 11.2% other ethnicity). Study questions examined sensation seeking in early adolescence (mean age?=?12.16) and its relations with later substance use initiation (mean age?=?15.69), and tested whether neighborhood disadvantage moderated sensation seeking’s effects on initiation of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use. Neighborhood disadvantage significantly moderated the relation between sensation seeking and all three forms of substance use. For the most part, sensation seeking effects were weakened as neighborhood disadvantage increased, with the most advantaged neighborhoods exhibiting the strongest link between sensation seeking and substance use initiation. These results highlight the importance of focusing on relatively advantaged areas as potentially risky environments for the sensation seeking pathway to substance use

Long-term Effects of a Universal Family Intervention: Mediation through Parent-Child Conflict

This randomized trial of a family-focused preventive intervention for Mexican American middle schoolers examined internalizing, externalizing, and substance use outcomes in late adolescence, 5 years after completing the intervention. Parent–adolescent conflict was tested as a mediator of these effects. The role of parent and adolescent acculturation in these pathways was also examined. There were 494 seventh-grade adolescents and their primary female caregivers randomized to receive either a 9-week multicomponent intervention or a brief workshop control group. Assessments were conducted at pretest, 2-year follow-up (9th grade), and 5-year follow-up (when most participants were in the 12th grade). The Bridges program significantly reduced mother–adolescent conflict measured in the 9th grade, with conflict mediating program effects on internalizing and externalizing symptoms, adolescent substance use, and diagnosed internalizing disorder in late adolescence. Mother and child acculturation were both significantly predictive of late adolescence outcomes. Contrary to hypotheses, neither mother nor child acculturation emerged as a significant predictor of mother–adolescent conflict, and the interaction of mother and adolescent acculturation was similarly not related to mother–adolescent conflict. Intervention effects were largely consistent across different levels of acculturation. These findings provide support for the efficacy of family-focused intervention during early adolescence, both in reducing mental health problems and substance use in the long term and in impacting parent–adolescent conflict processes that appear to play an important role in the development of later adjustment problems

Young Adolescents’ Digital Technology Use and Mental Health Symptoms: Little Evidence of Longitudinal or Daily Linkages

This study examines whether 388 adolescents’ digital technology use is associated with mental-health symptoms during early adolescence to midadolescence. Adolescents completed an initial Time 1 (T1) assessment in 2015, followed by a 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) via mobile phone in 2016–2017 that yielded 13,017 total observations over 5,270 study days. Adolescents’ T1 technology use did not predict later mental-health symptoms. Adolescents’ reported mental health was also not worse on days when they reported spending more versus less time on technology. Little was found to support daily quadratic associations (whereby adolescent mental health was worse on days with little or excessive use). Adolescents at higher risk for mental-health problems also exhibited no signs of increased risk for mental-health problems on higher technology use days. Findings from this EMA study do not support the narrative that young adolescents’ digital technology usage is associated with elevated mental-health symptoms

Synthesizing a Special Issue on Parenting Adolescents in an Increasingly Diverse World

Our goal is to identify integrative themes in this special issue on “Parenting Adolescents in an Increasingly Diverse World”. Specifically, we identify themes that may generalize largely from studies of marginalized families to guide American families more broadly as youth navigate an increasingly diverse world. We describe three broad diversity socialization goals that may foster greater intercultural maturity in youth. These include helping youth find their place and value in a multicultural world, increase the value that they place on others and decrease their fears of difference, and prepare to respond to biased or perceived rejection. And we offer five directions for future research to help build a path forward in this important area of study

Text message content as a window into college student drinking: Development and initial validation of a dictionary of “alcohol-talk”

The ubiquity of digital communication within the high-risk drinking environment of college students raises exciting new directions for prevention research. However, we are lacking relevant constructs and tools to analyze digital platforms that serve to facilitate, discuss, and rehash alcohol use. In the current study, we introduce the construct of alcohol-talk (or the extent to which college students use alcohol-related words in text messaging exchanges) as well as introduce and validate a novel tool for measuring this construct. We describe a closed-vocabulary, dictionary-based method for assessing alcohol-talk. Analyses of 569,172 text messages from 267 college students indicate that this method produces a reliable and valid measure that correlates as expected with self-reported alcohol and related risk constructs. We discuss the potential utility of this method for prevention studies

Externalizing and Internalizing Pathways to Mexican American Adolescents’ Risk Taking

This study used four waves of data from a longitudinal study of 749 Mexican origin youths to test a developmental cascades model linking contextual adversity in the family and peer domains in late childhood to a sequence of unfolding processes hypothesized to predict problem substance use and risky sexual activity (greater number of sex partners) in late adolescence. Externalizing and internalizing problems were tested as divergent pathways, with youth-reported and mother-reported symptoms examined in separate models. Youth gender, nativity, and cultural orientation were tested as moderators. Family risk, peer social rejection, and their interaction were prospectively related to externalizing symptoms and deviant peer involvement, although family risk showed stronger effects on parent-reported externalizing and peer social rejection showed stronger effects on youth-reported externalizing. Externalizing symptoms and deviant peers were related, in turn, to risk taking in late adolescence, including problem alcohol–substance use and number of sexual partners. Peer social rejection predicted youth-reported internalizing symptoms, and internalizing was related, in turn, to problem alcohol and substance use in late adolescence. Tests of moderation showed some of these developmental cascades were stronger for adolescents who were female, less oriented to mainstream cultural values, and more oriented to Mexican American cultural values

Text Messaging and Social Network Site Use to Facilitate Alcohol Involvement: Comparison of US and Korean College Students

Alcohol-related content on public social networking sites (SNS) has been linked to collegiate alcohol use, but we know little about whether and how private forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC), like text messaging, are related to collegiate drinking, nor how alcohol-related CMC content and drinking are associated in non-Western cultures. We examined the ways in which private text messaging and SNS are used to facilitate alcohol involvement among U.S. (n?=?575) and Korean (n?=?462) college students (total N?=?1037), two technologically wired cultures with prevalent collegiate alcohol misuse. Results show that college students prefer private text messaging over SNS to find parties and facilitate alcohol involvement, and this preference tends to be stronger in Korea than the United States. Private text messaging is more consistently and strongly associated with alcohol use frequency and heavy episodic drinking than SNS posts in both countries, with particularly robust associations between private text messaging and drinking in the United States. Findings underscore the role of CMCs in facilitating alcohol involvement and highlight the potential for analysis of private message content to further understand computer-mediated social processes in college student drinking

Ethnic Socialization in Neighborhood Contexts: Implications of Ethnic Attitude and Identity Development among Mexican-Origin Adolescents

Neighborhood Latino ethnic concentration, above and beyond or in combination with mothers' and fathers' ethnic socialization, may have beneficial implications for minority adolescents' ethnic attitude and identity development. These hypotheses, along with two competing hypotheses, were tested prospectively (from = 12.79–15.83 years) in a sample of 733 Mexican-origin adolescents. Neighborhood ethnic concentration had beneficial implications for ethnic identity processes (i.e., ethnic exploration and perceived peer discrimination) but not for ethnic attitudes. For Mexico-born adolescents, high maternal ethnic socialization compensated for living in neighborhoods low on ethnic concentration. Findings are discussed vis-à-vis the ways in which they address major gaps in the neighborhood effects literature and the ethnic and racial identity development literature

We-Talk, Communal Coping, and Cessation Success in a Couple-Focused Intervention for Health Compromised Smokers

We investigated first-person plural pronoun use (we-talk) by health-compromised smokers and their spouses as a possible implicit marker of adaptive, problem-resolving communal processes. Twenty couples in which one or both partners used tobacco despite one of them having a heart or lung problem participated in up to 10 sessions of a smoking cessation intervention designed to promote communal coping, where partners define smoking as “our” problem, rather than “your” problem or “my” problem, and take collaborative action to solve it. We used the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count automatic text analysis program to tabulate first-person pronoun use by both partners from transcripts of a pretreatment marital interaction task and later intervention sessions. Results indicated that pretreatment we-talk by the patient's spouse predicted whether the patient remained abstinent 12 months after quitting, and residualized change in we-talk by both partners during the course of intervention (controlling for baseline levels) predicted cessation outcomes as well. These findings add to evidence regarding the prognostic significance of partner we-talk for patient health and provide preliminary documentation of communal coping as a possible mechanism of change in couple-focused intervention

Substituent effects on the luminescent properties of europium B-diketonate complexes with dipyridophenazine ligands: a density functional theory study

A great deal of attention is devoted to creating and characterizing new and novel luminescent lanthanide complexes due to their impressive luminescent characteristics. Unique properties include line like emission bands, long luminescent life times, and large Stokes shifts, making lanthanides ideal for applications such as organic light emitting diodes, sensor technology, biomedical assays, biomedical imaging, and LASER technology. Lanthanides by themselves, though, suffer from low molar absorptivities as a result of quantum mechanically forbidden electric dipole transitions. To overcome these limitations, ‘antenna’ ligands are coordinated to the Ln(III) ion in order to sensitize lanthanide absorption by a series of energy transfer processes. Factors essential in controlling the efficiency of ligand sensitization are the lig- and based singlet S1 and triplet T1 state energies. By controlling the substituents of the neutral donor ligand, we can effectively tune these energy levels. This study uses density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) to inves- tigate the electronic properties of a series of Eu(TTA)DPPZ-R (R = H, NH2, Br, CO2H, CO2CH2CH3, CO2CH3, OCH3, CH3, and NO2) complexes where TTA = thenoyltrifluo- roacetone, DPPZ = dipryrido[3,2-a:2',3'-c] phenazine. DFT-optimized molecular structures agree within the experimental values. The results of the computational study reveal that the electron withdrawing substituent groups decrease the intersystem crossing ?EI S C and energy transfer ?EET energy gap with respect to unsubstituted DPPZ. Electron donating substituent groups will increase the ?EISC and ?EET energy gaps. Absorption spectra cal- culations show good agreement with available experimental absorption data. Luminescent quantum yield measurements of the complexes decreases with decreasing ?EISC and ?EET