Jessica L Borelli

University of California, Irvine | UCI ·  Department of Psychology and Social Behavior

Objective: This study aims to develop and validate an evaluation framework to ensure the safety and reliability of mental health chatbots, which are increasingly popular due to their accessibility, human-like interactions, and context-aware support. Materials and Methods: We created an evaluation framework with 100 benchmark questions and ideal res...

Loneliness is linked to wide ranging physical and mental health problems, including increased rates of mortality. Understanding how loneliness manifests is important for targeted public health treatment and intervention. With advances in mobile sending and wearable technologies, it is possible to collect data on human phenomena in a continuous and...

Introduction The transition to adolescence is marked by critical shifts in sleep, including increased variability as well as delayed bedtimes, reduced total sleep time (TST), and reduced homeostatic sleep pressure. Sleep supports healthy brain development, and insufficient sleep impairs brain development in children and adolescents. Short-term expe...

COVID-19 adversely impacted parents with substance use disorders (SUDs) as evidenced by increased overdoses. This study used a qualitative approach to examine COVID’s impact on experiences and perceptions of a parenting program designed for mothers in recovery from SUDs, “Mothering from the Inside Out” (MIO), implemented through Early Intervention...

Relational savoring (RS) is a brief, strengths‐based approach to heightening attentional focus to moments of positive connectedness within relationships. RS can be administered preventatively or within an intervention context when a therapist aspires to foster more optimal relational functioning. Typically administered within a one‐on‐one therapy s...

Mentalization, operationalized as reflective functioning (RF), is the ability to understand one’s own and another’s mental world implicitly or explicitly. RF is a newly discovered research field in Iran and is largely under-studied in Eastern cultures in general, underscoring the high need for cross-cultural studies in this field of research. A qua...

Some mothers report using avoidant coping strategies (minimizing, punishing) in response to their young children’s negative emotion, an aspect of insensitive parenting that places children at risk for emotional or behavioral dysregulation (Fabes et al., 2001) and insecure attachment (De Wolff & van Ijzendoorn, 1997). In prior work, an in-home attac...

The current study (a) examined ethnic differences in mothers’ and children’s responses to children’s performance in a challenging task, (b) tested the associations among children’s desire for assistance, maternal control, and children’s emotional responses to the challenge, and (c) explored whether these associations held across three ethnicities—A...

Emerging adulthood is characterized by marked increases in vulnerability to psychiatric illness. As such, understanding how risk and protective factors function to promote, or impede, resilience during early adulthood is critical. This pre-registered work is the first to test four extant models of resilience among emerging adults. 1,075 participant...

Bipolar spectrum disorders (BSDs) encompass severe and chronic mood disorders associated with social functioning difficulties. However, little work has examined more nuanced aspects of social functioning in BSDs. The present investigation recruited N=1,934 emerging adult college students to examine associations of self-reported bipolar spectrum ris...

Background Community service providers (CSPs) play an integral role in the health care of low-income Hispanic or Latinx (HL) communities. CSPs have high-stress frontline jobs and share the high-risk demographics of their communities. Relational savoring (RS) has been associated with lower cardiovascular reactivity and psychosocial benefits, with pa...

BACKGROUND Community service providers (CSPs) play an integral role in the health care of low-income Hispanic or Latinx (HL) communities. CSPs have high-stress frontline jobs and share the high-risk demographics of their communities. Relational savoring (RS) has been associated with lower cardiovascular reactivity and psychosocial benefits, with pa...

Loneliness is linked to wide ranging physical and mental health problems, including increased rates of mortality. Understanding how loneliness manifests is important for targeted public health treatment and intervention. With advances in mobile sending and wearable technologies, it is possible to collect data on human phenomena in a continuous and...

The adverse effects of loneliness on both physical and mental well-being are profound. Although previous research has utilized mobile sensing techniques to detect mental health issues, few studies have utilized state-of-the-art wearable devices to forecast loneliness and comprehend the physiological manifestations of loneliness and its predictive n...

Sleep quality is crucial to both mental and physical well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has notably affected the population's health worldwide, has been shown to deteriorate people's sleep quality. Numerous studies have been conducted to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sleep efficiency, investigating their relationships using...

Introduction This study aimed to clarify the role of mentalizing in pathways from attachment to Post Traumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS) in survivors of childhood maltreatment (CM). We focused on the transition to parenting, a critical period for reworking parenting representations to reduce intergenerational maltreatment cycles. Method Study partici...

Understanding factors that are related to engagement in health behaviors during a health emergency is critical. Positive psychology interventions have been shown to increase positive emotion toward others and the self; enhancing feelings of self-worth might, in turn, increase adherence to health behaviors. This may be particularly important for par...

California was the first state to implement statewide public health measures, including lockdowns and curfews, to mitigate the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The implementation of these public health measures may have had unintended consequences related to mental health for persons in California. This study is a retrospective review of electronic heal...

La COVID-19 ha afectado de forma desproporcionada a la comunidad latinx, lo que ha provocado una mayor inestabilidad económica y el aumento de la mortalidad y la morbilidad. Las trabajadoras de la salud comunitarias de primera línea (promotoras) han desempeñado un papel integral atendiendo a las comunidades de inmigrantes latinx de bajos ingresos,...

Mentalization refers to the ability to understand the mental states of oneself and those of others that motivate action and behavior. Mentalization has generally been linked to adaptive development and healthy functioning whereas diminished mentalization has been associated with maladaptive development and psychopathology. The vast majority of rese...

Purpose This study examined whether female college students could accurately detect unknown male students’ propensity for aggression/intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration in romantic relationships after viewing their online dating profile, as well as whether individual differences in women’s IPV victimization history or attachment orientatio...

Mothering from the Inside Out (MIO) is a mentalization-based parenting intervention developed to address challenges common among mothers experiencing substance use disorders (SUDs) and previously deemed effective when delivered by research clinicians. This randomized clinical trial was designed to test the efficacy of MIO when delivered by communit...

The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) provides an efficient way to measure a parent's capacity to recognize their child's mental states and to understand the relationship between underlying mental states and behavior. To date, limited work evaluates its psychometric properties beyond initial validation studies. Here we examined t...

Nancy E. Suchman's contributions to the fields of infant mental health, maternal reflective functioning, and attachment-based intervention will have long-lasting impacts. In particular, through the development and dissemination of her intervention program, Mothering from the Inside Out (MIO), she innovated a way of working with mothers with substan...

Despite supportive behaviors playing a central role in intimate relationships, the extent to which physiological and psychological factors are involved in the quality of the observed spousal support, remains largely unknown. From a physiological stance, cardiac synchrony has been identified as an important component involved in dyadic interpersonal...

Parenting interventions can improve parenting outcomes, with widespread implications for children's developmental trajectories. Relational savoring (RS) is a brief attachment-based intervention with high potential for dissemination. Here we examine data from a recent intervention trial in order to isolate the mechanisms by which savoring predicts r...

Plain English summary The current study described the procedure of developing a new measurement—the mother–daughter Shared Agency in Weight Management Scale (SAWMS). This scale aims to measure the different ways in which mothers work with their cisgender daughters in weight management. Based on self-reported survey data from cisgender female colleg...

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...

Background: The objective of this study was to assess potential challenges, prioritize adaptations, and develop an implementation and research approach to integrate and study a parenting intervention for mothers in recovery from substance use disorders in community-based home-visiting programs. Method: An explanatory mixed-methods design, guided...

This study recruited participants whose partners were deployed for active‐duty military service to examine whether anticipatory relational savoring moderated the association of psychological distress with relationship satisfaction. Two weeks prior to their partner's deployment (T1), participants (N = 73) completed a self‐report measure of relations...

Child abuse has intergenerational consequences for psychopathology, however, there remains a paucity of research regarding how these experiences affect Latinx families, particularly those at risk for additional negative life events, such as racial discrimination. This study aims to contribute to this gap in the literature by examining the impact ma...

In this study we seek to better understand the experience of children exposed to parental negative conditional regard (NCR), a parenting practice where parents’ emotional availability is contingent on behavioral compliance rather than provided unconditionally. We propose that children parented with greater levels of NCR will show stronger negative...

This study examined parental depression and parental reflective functioning (PRF) as predictors of parental proficiency in relational savoring (RS), the association between RS proficiency and a marker of children's physiological self-regulation, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), during a stressor, and indirect effects of parental depression and P...

Aims and objectives: To determine the frequency, timing, and duration of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) and their impact on health and function. Background: Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection is an emerging major public health problem that is poorly understood and has no current treatment or cure. PASC is a new syndr...

Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) is defined as persistent symptoms after apparent recovery from acute COVID-19 infection, also known as COVID-19 long-haul. We performed a retrospective review of electronic health records (EHR) from the University of California COvid Research Data Set (UC CORDS), a de-identified EHR of PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV...

Objective: Exponential increases in deportation and negative public discourse have resulted in heightened fears of profiling and deportation among Latinx immigrant families in the United States. Deportation fears could compound the inequalities Latinx families face, worsening mental and behavioral health. To better understand the mental health cons...

Individuals exhibit variability in the degree of correspondence between autonomic and subjective indicators of emotional experience. The current study examined whether convergence between autonomic arousal and negative emotions during emotion-inducing story vignettes is associated with internalizing symptoms in school-aged children. A diverse sampl...

Current digital mental healthcare solutions conventionally take on a reactive approach, requiring individuals to self-monitor and document existing symptoms. These solutions are unable to provide comprehensive, wrap-around, customized treatments that capture an individual’s holistic mental health model as it unfolds over time. Recognizing that each...

Parents’ emotion regulation and emotional experiences have important consequences for family well‐being and child outcomes. Little is known about whether traitlike emotion regulation abilities predict statelike experiences of real‐time negative emotion. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), this study examines associations between mothers’ s...

Parents have multifaceted identities, across dimensions like race/ethnicity, gender, and class, which shape their experience of discrimination. However, little is known about how distress from such multidimensional discrimination influences parenting behavior and parent–adolescent relationships. We tested associations between mothers’ multidimensio...

Background: Sleep disturbance is a transdiagnostic risk factor so prevalent among young adults it is considered a public health epidemic, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sleep may contribute to mental health via affect dynamics. Prior literature on contribution of sleep to affect is largely based on correlational studies or experiments that...

To determine whether the association between perceived social support or strain in close relationships and sleep outcomes varies by gender. Participants were selected from the Biomarker projects of either the MIDUS II or MIDUS Refresher study if they were in a married-or married-like relationship and shared a bed with their partner ( N = 989). A su...

Parenting young children poses numerous emotion regulation challenges, and prevention programs that promote emotion regulation skills can help with this important task of parenthood. Relational savoring (RS), which entails savoring a positive experience of interpersonal connectedness, is a brief manualized intervention program, 4 weeks in length, g...

Background Affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning; as such, monitoring and understanding affect is necessary for the assessment and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements in wearable technologies have increased the use of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (eg, affect, mood, and st...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on people worldwide, yet the psychological impact of collective traumas may differ at the individual and societal level. Parents may be exposed to greater pandemic-related stressors, yet also are more likely than non-parents to have social interactions during social distancing mandates. Furthermore,...

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event with devastating effects on children and families, highlighting and broadening disparities in the care of children with developmental disabilities, while simultaneously catalyzing innovation. Children are vulnerable to the impacts of COVID-19, resulting in increased stress, anxiety, isolation, and hea...

Parental depression has significant implications for family functioning, yet much of the literature does not consider family-level dynamics in investigating individual, parenting and child outcomes. In the current study we apply a new index of couple-level support, partner reflective functioning (RF), or the romantic partner's ability to consider h...

Positive maternal touch plays an important role in the development of children's physiological regulation and cognitive development in infancy, as well as the development of sociality in early childhood. However, few studies have looked beyond infancy to consider the possible continuing impact of positive maternal touch on child stress reactivity d...

Evidence for the effectiveness of attachment-based interventions in improving youth's socioemotional health increases each year, yet potential for scalability of existing programs is limited. Available programs may have lower acceptability within low-income immigrant communities. Co-designing and implementing interventions with trained community wo...

BACKGROUND Monitoring and understanding affective states are important aspects of healthy functioning and treatment of mood-based disorders. Recent advancements of ubiquitous wearable technologies have increased the reliability of such tools in detecting and accurately estimating mental states (e.g., mood, stress, etc.), offering comprehensive and...

Beginning with Ensink’s seminal study (2015), the field entered a new era in which we were able to measure mentalizing in school-aged children. The goal of this work is to continue developing the state of the research within this tradition by exploring the psychometric properties of the Child Reflective Functioning Scale (CRFS) - a measure applied...

Trauma exposure can lead to poor psychological health not only for those directly affected, but also for their children. Additional research is needed to understand mechanisms in the intergenerational sequelae of traumatic stress. The current study examined parenting stress as a moderator of the association between parents’ lifetime trauma exposure...

Maladaptive offspring emotion regulation has been identified as one pathway linking maternal and child psychological well-being in school-aged children. Whether such a pathway is present earlier in life still remains unclear. The present study investigated the role of preschoolers’ emotion reactivity and regulation in the association between matern...

Although many studies have documented associations between insecure attachment and psychopathology, attachment may not confer risk for psychopathology independently, but rather through its interaction with emotional, social, and biological factors. Understanding the variables through which attachment may lead to psychopathology is therefore importa...

Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity is important to physiological regulation. Limbic structures are important in determining what information the PNS receives, potentially influencing concurrent physiological responsivity and, ultimately, shaping PNS development. Yet, whether individual differences in these structures are linked to PNS ac...

This study used a family systems framework to examine associations between parent-child synchrony, interparental relationship satisfaction, and children's emotion regulation. The sample included 75 families from socioeconomically and ethnically diverse backgrounds who had a child between 18 and 27 months (Mage = 20.9 months). Mothers and fathers fr...

Obesity commonly emerges by adolescence and is associated with serious health consequences. Emotional eating (consuming calories, fats, and sugars in response to negative affect) may promote obesity; however, evidence is mixed as to whether negative affect increases obesogenic eating. Early-life adversity may shape malleable neurobiological systems...

BACKGROUND Sleep disturbance is a transdiagnostic risk factor so prevalent among young adults it is considered a public health epidemic, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sleep may contribute to mental health via affect dynamics. Prior literature on contribution of sleep to affect is largely based on correlational studies or experiments that do...

This 3-wave short-term longitudinal exploratory pilot study aimed to investigate the stability of both children’s attachment (Attachment Narrative Coherence [ANC]) and mentalizing (Reflective Functioning [RF]) and to explore the possible role played by children’s mentalizing in promoting attachment security over 1 year. Italian children (N = 22, Ma...

Barriers facing effective science-to-practice translation have led scholars to conduct early-stage intervention research within community organizations. We describe our experiences developing a manualized parent-youth attachment-based group therapy intervention within a community health organization dedicated to serving low-income Latinx immigrant...

Though fatherhood research has recently burgeoned, extant literature primarily focuses on father characteristics and father–child interactions. A critical gap remains in understanding fathers’ emotional experiences. Using the Parent Development Interview-Revised, 74 interviews with fathers of toddlers were coded using questions about six positive a...

The aim of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that attachment and childhood sexual abuse (CSA) interacted such that school aged CSA survivors with insecure attachment to parents would be at an elevated risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma symptoms. Participants (n = 111, ages 7–12) comprised two groups, c...

Objective: Since March 2020, millions of children have been confined to their homes and restricted from in-person activities, radically changing the dynamics of parent-child relationships. This study examines the association between coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) impact and the mental health of parents and school-aged children; specifically,...

Objectives This study aims to test the psychometric proprieties of the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (RFQ) applied to younger (13–16 years) and older (17–20 years) Italian adolescents examining (1) the factorial structure of RFQ; (2) its invariance across age and sex; (3) correlations between RFQ subscale scores, as well as the associations...

Personal informatics tools can help users self-reflect on their experiences. When reflective thought occurs, it sometimes leads to negative thought and emotion cycles. To help explain these cycles, we draw from Psychology to introduce the concept of rumination—anxious, perseverative cognition focused on negative aspects of the self—as a result of e...

Epidemiological studies suggest that more youth are identifying as gender expansive (e.g., transgender, gender nonconforming) than ever before. However, due to stressors like discrimination, gender minorities remain at significantly higher risk for mental and physical health problems than their cisgender peers. While initial research has shown that...