Devon Loparo

Emory University | EU · Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

The need to belong with peers is an essential component of development, and when individuals face peer rejection they often experience a host of negative outcomes, including internalizing and externalizing problems. There exists conflicting evidence whether peer rejection precedes, succeeds, or reciprocally influences psychopathology. This study us...

This study aimed to (1) evaluate how population levels of anxiety and depression grow and correlate from middle childhood through early adulthood, and (2) determine whether sex, family socioeconomic status, parental education, academic achievement, learning disabilities, or externalizing symptoms predict anxiety and/or depression levels and growth...

Self-compassion interventions have been suggested as a potentially more acceptable way to address body image distress compared to interventions that emphasize challenging (often firmly entrenched) thin-ideals. In the current randomized controlled trial, young adult women endorsing body image concerns were randomized to a self-compassion (SC) interv...

Introduction Due to increasing suicide rates, treatment engagement among suicidal youth is paramount. Identification of factors that predict treatment dropout could aid in bolstering treatment engagement. In this study, we examine whether demographic factors, specific treatment referrals, and interactions among referrals predict treatment dropout i...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) disproportionately impact African Americans because of profound subjection to historical-systemic oppression in addition to personal and intergenerational trauma exposure. This article utilizes a biopsychosocial-cultural framework to understand the correlates of ACE exposure in African Americans and attends to t...

Gender-specific substance use disorder treatment has demonstrated promise in adult women, but is relatively unexplored in young adults. To address the specific needs of young adult females, the manual-based Women’s Recovery Group (WRG) was adapted for women ages 18–25. Treatment engagement and retention, group cohesiveness, satisfaction, and substa...

The Africultural Coping Systems Inventory (ACSI) assesses African Americans’ culturally relevant stress coping strategies. Although its factor structure, reliability, and validity of the scores have been examined across ethnic groups of African descent persons, psychometric properties have not been investigated in an African American clinical sampl...

BACKGROUND Whether parental permission of alcohol and other drug use in a home environment is protective against substance‐related negative outcomes remains controversial. We investigated substance use at home, with or without parental knowledge, and its association with substance‐related consequences. METHODS The sample consisted of 21,207 U.S. s...

Background: Somatic complaints are a major driver of health care costs among patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Some epidemiologic and clinical data suggest that Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black patients with MDD endorse higher levels of somatic symptoms than non-Hispanic White patients. Methods: Somatic symptoms in 102 Hispanic, 61 n...

Objective:: Adults with major depressive disorder frequently do not achieve remission with an initial treatment. Addition of psychotherapy for patients who do not achieve remission with antidepressant medication alone can target residual symptoms and protect against recurrence, but the utility of adding antidepressant medication after nonremission...

Background: Early identification and appropriate referral services are priorities to prevent suicide. Aims: The aim of this study was to describe patterns of identification and referrals among three behavioral health centers and determine whether youth demographic factors and type of training received by providers were associated with identificatio...

This study is a pilot Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) that compares the effectiveness of a Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) group treatment to a support group in reducing depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation and increasing self-compassion and mindfulness in low-income African Americans who had attempted suicide (n = 82). After co...

Objective: This study examined whether (1) behavioral health providers were more likely to implement best practices when they were more confident in their abilities, (2) number of suicide prevention trainings was positively associated with perceived confidence in abilities and implementation of evidence-based practices, and (3) specific trainings...

The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), a widely used and comprehensive assessment of mindfulness, has demonstrated promising psychometric properties among non-clinical and clinical samples and among diverse international samples. Yet, to date, no studies have examined its factor structure, reliability, and validity in a clinical sample of...

Importance: Antisocial behavior (ASB) places a large burden on perpetrators, survivors, and society. Twin studies indicate that half of the variation in this trait is genetic. Specific causal genetic variants have, however, not been identified. Objectives: To estimate the single-nucleotide polymorphism-based heritability of ASB; to identify nove...

The current study used the Health Belief Model to develop a measure that assessed the emotional benefits and barriers of professional psychological services in an African American women sample. Data from 251 African American women recruited from online organizations from across the United States (n = 164) and a Midwestern university psychology subj...

There is evidence that individuals emotionally abused as children endorse more hopelessness, a precursor of suicidal behavior in adulthood. However, there has been little focus on this association among African-Americans or on factors that may mediate the childhood emotional abuse (CEA) - adult hopelessness link. The present study examined whether...

Naturalistic studies of gene-environment interactions (G X E) have been plagued by several limitations, including difficulty isolating specific environmental risk factors from other correlated aspects of the environment, gene-environment correlation (rGE ), and the use of a single genetic variant to represent the influence of a gene. We present res...

The equal environments assumption (EEA) of the twin method posits that environmental influences that are etiologically relevant to a given phenotype are no more likely to be shared by monozygotic (MZ) than dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs. One method of testing the EEA is to evaluate whether increased rearing environment similarity in MZ twin pairs compar...

The oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) has been studied as a risk factor for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) owing to converging evidence from multiple levels of analysis that oxytocin (OXT) has an important role in the regulation of affiliative behavior and social bonding in both nonhuman mammals and humans. Inconsistency in the effect sizes of the OXTR...