Andres De Los Reyes

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Psychology

Researchers use multiple informants’ reports to assess and examine behavior. However, informants’ reports commonly disagree. Informants’ reports often disagree in their perceived levels of a behavior (“low” versus “elevated” mood), and examining multiple reports in a single study often results in inconsistent findings. Although researchers often es...

Child and adolescent patients may display mental health concerns within some contexts and not others (e.g., home vs. school). Thus, understanding the specific contexts in which patients display concerns may assist mental health professionals in tailoring treatments to patients' needs. Consequently, clinical assessments often include reports from mu...

Over 60 years of research reveal that informants who observe youth in clinically relevant contexts (e.g., home, school)―typically parents, teachers, and youth clients themselves―often hold discrepant views about that client’s needs for mental health services (i.e., informant discrepancies). The last 10 years of research reveal that these discrepanc...

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...

Validly characterizing youth mental health phenomena requires evidence-based approaches to assessment. An evidence-based assessment cannot rely on a "gold standard" instrument but rather, batteries of instruments. These batteries include multiple modalities of instrumentation (e.g., surveys, interviews, performance-based tasks, physiological readin...

Learning how to do great science requires a toolbox of skills. Skills for effectively communicating science. To secure funding for scientific work. To identify where and when job opportunities arise. To get the offers to start your first job and build the record to keep that job. No one takes a class to acquire this toolbox, who has the time? Yet,...

Accumulating evidence supports the presence of a general psychopathology dimension, the p factor (‘p’). Despite growing interest in the p factor, questions remain about how p is assessed. Although multi-informant assessment of psychopathology is commonplace in clinical research and practice with children and adolescents, almost no research has take...

During adolescence, youth increase in both independence and conflict with parents. Parents vary in how much they know about their adolescents’ whereabouts and activities and how they acquire this information (i.e., the sources of what parents know). We probed how parental knowledge of adolescents’ whereabouts and activities—and their information so...

Adolescents frequently experience social anxiety, with parents often serving as the primary source of clinical referral. Yet, adolescents’ needs for services often revolve around social anxiety that manifests when interacting with unfamiliar peers. Emerging work indicates that parents’ reports about adolescent social anxiety fail to predict adolesc...

This book probes professional development issues crucial to early career researchers, beginning with advice on selecting mentors and optimizing mentoring relationships. From this foundation, the book describes how to navigate the peer-review process, particularly when publishing in academic journals, as well as build connections between the differe...

Mental health problems impact students' social, emotional, and academical development, and as such these problems strongly predict learning difficulties and academic achievement generally. Students with disabilities and special needs are at greater risk for mental health problems. The assessment of mental health problems in students is therefore an...

People experiencing an array of mental health concerns may seek assistance from any number of health care practitioners, including from the health sciences, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and even unlicensed/unregulated providers. Unfortunately, many of these practitioners receive little or no training in mental health diagnosis and...

Evidence-based assessment (EBA) requires that investigators employ scientific theories and research findings to guide decisions about what domains to measure, how and when to measure them, and how to make decisions and interpret results. To implement EBA, investigators need high-quality assessment tools along with evidence-based processes. We advan...

Purpose Researchers and service providers typically assess pediatric Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) by collecting independent reports from parents and youth. An emerging body of work indicates that patterns of parent-youth reports yield information germane to understanding youth outcomes. We identified patterns of HRQOL among youth and thei...

Youth who experience psychopathy display multiple impairments across interpersonal (grandiose-manipulative [GM]), affective (callous-unemotional [CU]), lifestyle (daring-impulsive [DI]), and potentially antisocial and behavioral features. Recently, it has been acknowledged that the inclusion of psychopathic features can offer valuable information i...

ARTICLE FREE TO ACCESS AT: https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2022.2158842. In this editorial statement, we briefly delineated a series of observations, guidelines, and directions for future research focused on the most common outcome of multi-informant assessments of youth mental health. Discrepancies commonly occur between estimates of youth mental...

Evidence-based assessment (EBA) requires that investigators employ scientific theories and research findings to guide decisions about what domains to measure, how and when to measure them, and how to make decisions and interpret results. To implement EBA, investigators need high quality assessment tools along with evidence-based processes. We advan...

Parental monitoring, conceptualized as parental knowledge of adolescents’ activities and whereabouts, is a robust predictor of adolescent engagement in risk behaviors. Influenced by the parenting triad framework of parental motivations/beliefs, monitoring, and behavior management, we investigated how knowledge is associated with (a) domains of pare...

In child clinical psychology, parent and child reports are typically used to make treatment decisions and determine the effectiveness of treatment. However, there are often moderate to large discrepancies between parent and child reports, and these discrepancies may reflect meaningful information about the parent, the child, and the parent–child re...

On page 1 of his classic text, Millsap (2011) states, “Measurement invariance is built on the notion that a measuring device should function the same way across varied conditions, so long as those varied conditions are irrelevant [emphasis added] to the attribute being measured.” By construction, measurement invariance techniques require not only d...

Contextual behavioural science (CBS) methods are frequently applied in research to gain insight on the intricacies of human behaviour and have become integrated in psychological treatments, including acceptance commitment therapy and applied behavioural analysis. The Association of Contextual Behavioural Science (ACBS) Task Force recently provided...

Accurately assessing youth mental health involves obtaining reports from multiple informants who typically display low levels of correspondence. This low correspondence may reflect situational specificity. That is, youth vary as to where they display mental health concerns and informants vary as to where and from what perspective they observe youth...

We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youths ( Ns = 2,119, 303, and 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 mod...

Socially anxious adolescents commonly experience impaired interpersonal functioning with unfamiliar, same-age peers. Yet, we lack short screening tools for assessing peer-related impairments. Recent work revealed that a parent-reported, three-item screening tool produced scores that uniquely related to social anxiety concerns. However, this tool ou...

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 impair...

Adolescents with elevated social anxiety commonly experience peer-related impairments-particularly with same-age, unfamiliar peers-stemming from their avoidant behaviors. Yet, peer-related impairments are not unique to social anxiety. For example, adolescents who experience social anxiety may also experience symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactiv...

Biological psychiatry, like many other scientific fields, is grappling with the challenge of revising its practices with an eye towards promoting diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI). One arena in which much of this work will have significant impact is in developmental science generally, and the study of adolescence specifically. Adolescence is...

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 atten...

Objective: Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents, and suicidal thoughts represent key predictors to suicidal behavior. Yet, suicidal thoughts can be challenging to accurately assess. Symptoms that commonly co-occur with suicidal thoughts, such as depressive symptoms, may provide valuable information for predicting these thoughts. A...

Harmful alcohol consumption can significantly compromise adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Prior research has identified aggregate relationships between alcohol use and ART non-adherence, largely relying on concurrent assessment of these domains. There is relatively limited evidence on more nuanced day-level associations between alcohol us...

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 ps...

Data from multiple school sources, including informant ratings, systematic direct observations (SDOs), and school wide data (e.g., office disciplinary referrals [ODRs]) are routinely used to guide decision making in the delivery of evidence based practices for students with externalizing and internalizing behavior problems. Over 50 years of researc...

Socially anxious adolescents often endure anxiety-provoking situations using safety behaviors: strategies for minimizing in-the-moment distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact, rehearsing statements before entering a conversation). Studies linking safety behaviors to impaired functioning have largely focused on adults. In a sample of 134 14-15 year-old...

Recent societal upheavals have highlighted stark inequalities that affect the livelihood of marginalized individuals pursuing research careers. Established scientists have a unique role to play as casual mentors, or experienced scholars who are well-positioned to serve as allies to early career researchers by informally advising on academia’s hidde...

Academics are not immune to the biases contributing to persistent inequalities in society. We face an urgent need to overhaul and dismantle current evaluation practices that uphold inequities at multiple points along the academic pipeline. Graduate admissions and faculty advancement are two arenas of gatekeeping in which a reimagining and redistrib...

Adolescents experiencing social anxiety often engage in safety behaviors―covert avoidance strategies for managing distress (e.g., avoiding eye contact)―that factor into the development and maintenance of their concerns. Prior work supports the psychometric properties of the Subtle Avoidance Frequency Examination (SAFE), a self-report survey of safe...

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: th...

Individuals often vary in how they display signs and symptoms of personality disturbances and psychopathology. As such, comprehensive assessments of these signs and symptoms should capture how they manifest within and across time and contexts (e.g., community, home, and work). Contexts may vary in the degree to which they influence personality and...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is among the most commonly diagnosed disorders of children and youth. Young people receive their ADHD diagnoses and medical treatment in primary health care settings and can experience a range of behavioral and educational disabilities treated in the clinic, at home, and at school. We propose a Team-B...

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...

Substantial research has investigated the impact of social support on the development and course of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, its measurement has been inconsistent, and different facets of social support may have differential effects on suicidal ideation (SI). The present study used data from 743 veterans recruited between 2008 and...

This editorial serves as the inauguration of my second term as Editor of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (2022-2025). Access the full article free of charge here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15374416.2020.1858839

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...

Fears of negative and positive evaluation (i.e., evaluative fears) manifest within performance-based situations (e.g., public speaking, group presentations), particularly among those experiencing social anxiety. Within these performance-based situations, individuals experiencing such evaluative fears frequently display a variety of impairments (e.g...

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. T...

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-bas...

This is the peer review and follow up correspondence

This paper comments on the use of difference scores in the Journal of Marriage and Family. We articulate the challenges with the interpretation of difference scores by summarizing studies published in the last 7 years and used difference scores and then focus on one example study “Is Your Spouse More Likely to Divorce You if You Are the Older Partn...

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...

2021 Recipient of a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association Winner of the 2021 Early Career Psychologist Champion Award from the American Psychological Association Research isn’t all elegant study designs, accurate data collection, and sophisticated equations. Researchers must also communicate their ideas and findings w...

Understanding how mental health treatments benefit those who receive treatment comes with a challenge: Often different people involved in treatment have different impressions of the treatment’s ultimate effects. How do people reconcile these different reports to understand the true benefit of treatment? In a series of 4 experiments, we tested peopl...

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) t...

Compared to childhood and adulthood, adolescence is a time of greater risk-taking behavior, potentially resulting in serious consequences. Theories of adolescent brain development highlight the imbalance between neural circuitry for reward vs. regulation. Although this imbalance may make adolescents more vulnerable to impaired decision-making in th...

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 ado...

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 i...

Attempts to understand subjectivity have historically involved distinguishing the strengths of subjective methods (e.g., survey ratings from informants) from those of alternative methods (e.g., observational/performance-based tasks). Yet, a movement is underway in Psychology that considers the merits of intersubjectivity: Understanding the space be...

Compared to childhood and adulthood, adolescence is a time of greater risk-taking behavior, potentially resulting in serious consequences. Theories of adolescent brain development highlight the imbalance between neural circuitry for reward vs. regulation. Although this imbalance may make adolescents more vulnerable to impaired decision-making in th...

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 i...

Innovations in CBT for Childhood Anxiety, OCD, and PTSD - edited by Lara J. Farrell April 2019

The daily emotional experiences of adolescents are dynamic, vary significantly across individuals, and are crucial to their psychological adjustment, warranting a need to identify factors that promote adaptive affective responses to stressors and attenuated affective instability. The objective of this study, therefore, was to examine protective fac...

Adolescents at a high-risk for experiencing social anxiety display elevated distress and social skills deficits in social interactions with unfamiliar peers. However, not all adolescents find the same interactions distressing, necessitating an approach that is sensitive to key aspects of the social contexts in which interactions manifest. Along the...

Family relationships play an essential role in adolescent development. When studying relationship domains (e.g., quality, conflict, communication), researchers typically rely on adolescents and their parents as informants. However, across research teams, domains, and methods of measurement, researchers commonly observe discrepant estimates of famil...

This comprehensive, 51-chapter handbook presents recent advances in the expression, etiology, assessment, and treatment of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders and related problems from a developmental psychopathology perspective. Following a broad conceptual overview of this area of clinical research and practice, assessment and treatment pr...

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 psy...

This study examined the associations between friend conflict, defined as arguments with friends, and affective states using a daily diary design in a community sample of adolescents. Participants were 100 U.S. adolescents (13-17 years; 40% girls; 79% white). Adolescents completed an online survey on 14 consecutive evenings. Adolescents reported sig...

The proper role of research skills and training to conduct research in professional psychology education has been controversial throughout the history of the field. An extensive effort was undertaken recently to address that issue and identify ways the field might move forward in a more unified manner. In 2015, the American Psychological Associatio...

Impairments in peer relations comprise a core feature of social anxiety, particularly among adolescents. Yet, these impairments may also stem from concerns that commonly co-occur with social anxiety, namely depressive symptoms and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. Although peer-related impairments spike during adolescence, w...

Safety behaviors are subtle avoidance strategies for minimizing distress within social situations (e.g., avoidance of eye contact). These behaviors factor prominently in the development and maintenance of social anxiety concerns, and when patients use these behaviors within psychosocial treatments for social anxiety, this may impede treatment respo...

In 2014, Michael Southam-Gerow and Mitch Prinstein launched the Evidence Base Updates series. As invited contributors, authors of Evidence Base Updates articles offer the field an invaluable resource: Regular evaluations of the latest data on tools for addressing the mental health needs of children and adolescents. Until now, authors of Evidence Ba...

Adolescents experiencing social anxiety often experience co-occurring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. Yet, assessing for social anxiety poses challenges given the already time-consuming task of distinguishing social anxiety from other commonly co-occurring internalizing conditions (e.g., generalized anxiety, major depressi...

In child clinical psychology, parent and child reports are typically used to make treatment decisions and determine the effectiveness of treatment. However, there are often moderate to large discrepancies between parent and child reports, and these discrepancies may reflect meaningful information about the parent, the child, and the parent–child re...

Clinical assessments involve understanding displays of mental disorder symptoms in the contexts in which they display. Contextual information plays a large role in externalizing disorder assessments. Yet, we know little about contextual information's impact within internalizing disorder assessments. Panic disorder symptoms develop outside environme...

Understanding how clinicians and laypeople make critical decisions related to the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health is an important step toward improving mental health. This Special Section features new research that, collectively, leverages interdisciplinary approaches from basic psychological science to enhance our understandi...

Adolescents who experience social anxiety tend to hold fears about negative evaluations (e.g., taunting), and may also hold fears about positive evaluations (e.g., praise from a teacher). The Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (BFNE) scale and Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (FPES) are two widely used measures of adults’ evaluative concerns. Yet,...

Adolescent social anxiety (SA) assessments often include adolescent and parent reports, and low reporting correspondence results in uncertainties in clinical decision-making. Adolescents display SA within non-home contexts such as peer interactions. Yet, current methods for collecting peer reports raise confidentiality concerns, though adolescent S...

Parent-adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent-adolescent conflict (i.e....

BACKGROUND: Among adolescents, depressive symptoms commonly co-occur with social anxiety, with social anxiety often developmentally preceding depressive symptoms. Thus, evidence-based assessments of adolescent social anxiety should be augmented with assessments of depressive symptoms using measures that can be administered across developmental tran...

Background: Discrepancy between informants (parents and teachers) in severity ratings of core symptoms commonly arise when assessing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Whether such discrepancy yields unique information about the ASD phenotype and its clinical correlates has not been examined. We examined whether degree of discrepancy between parent a...

Background A key element of the evidence-based assessment and treatment movements is ensuring an adequate representation of clients across the different settings in which they receive mental health care (e.g., research and routine or usual care settings). Prior work has focused on comparing clients from research settings to those from usual care se...

This is the editorial for the inaugural issue of my first term as Editor of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (2017-2021)