Introduction: Sleep disturbances are common among adolescents and are associated with elevated anxiety, and dificulties managing affect. Familial conlict is associated with both anxiety sensitivity and adolescent sleep disturbances. No work to date has examined how adolescent sleep disturbances may interact with anxiety sensitivity in relation to adolescent affective responding to parent-adolescent conlict. The current study was designed to address this gap in the literature by examining how adolescent sleep disturbances, anxiety sensitivity, conlict elicited anger, and conlict avoidance are associated. Method: Seventy-two American adolescents (n = 39 males) between the ages of 12 and 16 years (M age = 13.84, SD = 1.38) completed a baseline assessment as well as a well-validated motheradolescent laboratory-based conlict task. Results: For youth low in anxiety sensitivity, greater sleep disturbance related positively to conlict-elicited anger, which in turn predicted higher conlict avoidance. In contrast, this indirect effect was not signiicant for adolescents relatively higher in anxiety sensitivity. Instead, for these adolescents, increased sleep disturbances were associated with lower levels of conlict elicited anger. Conclusions: Results suggest that the effects of sleep disturbances on conlict elicited anger may vary as a function of adolescent anxiety vulnerability. These indings highlight the importance of considering the unique effects of sleep disturbances on adolescent affect as a function of adolescent anxiety vulnerability.Sleep and Affective Reactivity. Sleep disturbances are common and chronic among adolescents, and are associated with increased risk for a host of psychological and somatic issues (Roberts, Roberts,

Introduction Adolescence is characterized by the onset of a relatively specific set of socioemotional disorders (i.e., depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and eating disorders) as well as body dysmorphia symptoms. Appearance‐related concerns are a central feature of these disorders. Emerging evidence in adults suggests that appearance‐related safety behaviors may play an instrumental role in the onset and maintenance of a number of disorders. To date, no work has examined appearance‐related safety behaviors during adolescence. The present study examined the extent to which appearance‐related safety behaviors may be associated with socioemotional and body dysmorphia symptoms during adolescence. Methods Adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 years old (N = 387, Mage = 14.82 years, 31.3% identified as male, 47.0% identified as female, and 19.1% identified as nonbinary/third gender, 2.6% declined to report gender identity) completed measures assessing negative affect, anxiety‐relevant safety behavior use, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, appearance‐related safety behaviors, body dysmorphia symptoms, and socioemotional symptoms. Structural Equation Modeling was used to test hypotheses. Results The results of this study suggest that appearance‐related safety behaviors evidenced associations with latent factors corresponding to affective (i.e., depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety), eating disorders, and body dysmorphia symptoms after controlling for previously established vulnerability factors. Conclusions These findings demonstrate that appearance‐related safety behaviors may evidence transdiagnostic associations with socioemotional symptoms and body dysmorphia symptoms during adolescence.

No abstract

No abstract

Much research has demonstrated that psychopathology can be described in terms of broad dimensions, representing liability for multiple psychiatric disorders. Broad spectra of psychopathology (e.g., internalizing and externalizing) are increasingly used as targets for research investigating the development, etiology, and course of psychopathology because they account for patterns of relatedness among disorders that were once presumed distinct. Thus, these spectra represent alluring targets due to their comprehensive and parsimonious nature. Nevertheless, little research has established the role of individual disorders over and above broad dimensions in the study of psychopathology. In the current study, we investigate whether there are unique etiological associations between individual internalizing disorders and personality traits after accounting for their etiological associations with a broad internalizing dimension. We used a community sample of twins (Npairs = 448) ages 4 to 19 to examine the etiological associations between internalizing psychopathology and Big Five personality dimensions. In terms of genetic covariation, a broad internalizing dimension was positively associated with neuroticism and negatively associated with extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Moreover, internalizing accounted for most of the genetic variance shared between individual internalizing disorders and personality traits. Nevertheless, there were unique genetic associations between the following pairs of personality traits and disorders: neuroticism and social anxiety, extraversion and social anxiety, agreeableness and depression, and conscientiousness and compulsions. There was little evidence of environmental influences shared between internalizing and personality. In sum, a broad internalizing dimension adequately accounted for almost all of the etiologic covariation between internalizing disorders and personality, with several interesting exceptions.