This study mainly compared the prevalence of internalizing symptoms of 834 Spanish and 159 Latin-American immigrant adolescents. Participants completed self-report measures about depression, anxiety and somatic symptoms and a socio-demographic questionnaire. The results indicated that being Latin-American was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms and being female was related to higher depressive and anxiety symptoms. Gender differences were more prevalent in Spaniards than in Latinos, with girls showing more symptoms than boys. High socio-economic status was negatively related to depressive symptoms and anxiety. The results may alert clinicians of the importance of assessing depressive symptoms in Latino adolescents in order to treat this group of youths effectively.

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The present study examines the prevalence of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) in a population 1,061 adolescents (mean age 13.92) in Spain. The association between OCS and anxiety symptoms severity (panic attacks, separation anxiety, social phobia, generalized anxiety and school phobia) and depressive symptom severity has also been studied. Two distinct groups of subjects were defined and analyzed as being ‘positive’ on the obsessive-compulsive screen: The first group (called High interference) included all of the subjects who scored 25 or more in Leyton Obsessional Inventory-Child Version (LOI-CV) interference score regardless of symptom presence score, and the second group (labeled High symptom presence) consisted of all subjects with a symptom presence score equal to or above 15 and an interference score of 10 or less. Females scored higher than did males both on the symptom presence and interference scores. Forty- one subjects (3.9%) showed an interference score of 25 or more (high interference group) while eight students (0.8%) were included in the high symptom presence group. The most prevalent and interfering symptoms were: fussy about hands, hating dirt and contamination and going over things a lot. In addition, the association between LOI and depressive symptom severity was significant, while the association between LOI and anxiety symptoms severity was insignificant.

Regarding the importance of obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), the aim of this paper is to examine some of the roots of OCD with relation to the socio-cultural factors. By using the two dimensions of TAF, likelihood and moral, we conducted a survey research based on three groups: 1) OCD patients (39 samples), 2) patients with other anxiety disorders rather than OCD (19 samples) 3) and normal participants (30 samples) to allow us different comparisons between these three groups.Results show that there are positive correlation between TAF beliefs and the obsessive compulsive symptoms. Also, compared with normal participants, patients with OCD and patients that have other anxiety disorders had a higher level of TAF-likelihood-other belief. The occurrence of thought suppression was more or less equal in OCD and other anxiety patients, although it was higher compared with normal groups.Most of previous researches found a higher level of TAF-likelihood than TAF-moral in OCD patients indicating that the interpretation thoughts about the likelihood of the occurrence of a negative event is a stronger mechanism than the engagement in the anxiety raised from immoral thoughts. However, the results of this study showed a contrary finding as in our samples, the mechanism of TAF-moral was stronger than TAF-likelihood.Explaining this finding, we got deeper to the cultural and religious beliefs of the targeted population and through qualitative interviews with some of the audiences we realized that there are a plenty of religious and cultural elements that foster the mechanism of TAF-morality.

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