Rebecca G Etkin

• PhD
• Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University

Questions have been raised about how social media may be experienced by adolescents with mental health concerns. Among socially anxious adolescents, social media may be experienced both negatively, because it can exacerbate core fears (e.g., negative evaluation), and positively, because it can alleviate other core fears (e.g., in-person interaction...

Parents play an integral role in the etiology of child and adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders (i.e., anxiety-related disorders; ARDs). In this chapter, we describe a treatment for child and adolescent ARDs that involves only parents and relies solely on parent behavior change. The treatment, SPACE (Supportive Parenting f...

Objective Functional somatic symptoms are associated with significant distress and impairment for children and their families. Despite the central role that families play in their children’s care, there is little clinical research to guide how parents can support their children with functional somatic symptoms and promote better functioning. To add...

Anxiety disorders (ADs) frequently lead to significant impairment across important domains of youth functioning. Yet until recently, clinical research and assessment have largely neglected the measurement of anxiety-related impairment. In this article, we review the evidence for five extant rating scales of youth anxiety-related impairment, guided...

Child and adolescent anxiety disorders (ADs) contribute to impairment in social functioning and peer relationships, exacerbating anxiety and related difficulties. The extent to which the AD treatment with the strongest evidence-base, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), improves social functioning and peer relationships is unclear. In this article,...

As friends increase in closeness and influence during adolescence, some friends may become overprotective, or excessively and intrusively protective. Engaging in overprotective behavior, and being the recipient of such behavior, may have positive and negative adjustment trade-offs. The current study examines, for the first time, bidirectional assoc...

In the United States, legislation ensures that schools provide accommodations to students with disabilities and conditions that impair their functioning. Students with social anxiety, who face many challenges in the school context, often receive these accommodations. Yet, it is unknown whether school-based accommodations achieve their intended aims...

Research has uncovered a wide range of predictors of youth anxiety treatment outcome (i.e., symptom severity and diagnostic remission). Youth's social functioning is one predictor that has been rarely studied, however, which is a significant gap given its importance to development and clinical functioning. We address this gap by examining two aspec...

It is well established that anxiety can contribute to social functioning difficulties during childhood and adolescence. It is less clear which anxious youth are most likely to struggle socially, and what types of difficulties they are likely to experience, limiting the extent of identification and intervention efforts. In this study, we aim to impr...

Overprotection is a known risk factor in parent-child relationships, but has received little attention in the context of friendships. No studies have examined overprotection in emerging-adult friendships. Yet, overprotection may be especially significant during this developmental period given the prevalence of autonomy-seeking and risk-taking behav...

Over the past several years, family accommodation (FA) has gained increasing recognition for its role in child and adolescent anxiety disorders. Recent clinical trials highlight the importance of assessing and addressing FA within the context of treatment, with findings showing that FA is a significant predictor of treatment success. This clinical...

Social withdrawal refers to the behavioral tendency to remove oneself from familiar and unfamiliar peers (Rubin, Coplan, & Bowker, 2009). In this chapter we review the research on social withdrawal during the adolescent developmental period (10–18 years), with an emphasis on findings concerning the significance of peers. Following the framework out...

This Evidence Base Update of parent-report measures of youth anxiety symptoms is a companion piece to our update on youth self-report anxiety symptom measures (Etkin et al., 2021). We rate the psychometric properties of the parent-report measures as Adequate, Good, or Excellent using criteria developed by Hunsley and Mash (2008) and Youngstrom et a...

Evidence-based assessment serves several critical functions in clinical child psychological science, including being a foundation for evidence-based treatment delivery. In this Evidence Base Update, we provide an evaluative review of the most widely used youth self-report measures assessing anxiety and its disorders. Guided by a set of evaluative c...

Informed by prior work on social withdrawal and gender role norms, the present study utilizes data from a large sample of U.S. (n = 656) and Canadian (n = 560) university students (Mage = 19.65 years) to test if the degree to which behaviors of social withdrawal are judged to be acceptable depends on (a) the motivation underlying the behavior (i.e...

This study investigates the prospective and reciprocal associations between positive peer treatment and psychosocial (popularity, preference, psychological distress) and behavioral (prosocial behavior) outcomes during early adolescence. Participants were 270 young adolescents (52% boys; Mage = 11.84 years) who completed peer nomination and self‐rep...

Hikikomori (social withdrawal that lasts six months or longer) is a growing problem among Japanese adolescents and young adults, with recent estimates that approximately 1% of Japanese youths will suffer from an episode of hikikomori in their lifetimes. What remains unclear is whether hikikomori is a culture-bound syndrome or a condition impacting...

For the first time, we investigate associations between overprotective behavior within the context of adolescent friendships and psychosocial outcomes. Young adolescents participating in two studies (Ns = 270 and 179; 49% boys) completed self-report measures of psychological functioning, social problems (also assessed with peer nominations), and fr...

Informed by past theory and research on social withdrawal, the aims of this study were to investigate whether three subtypes of social withdrawal (shyness, avoidance, unsociability) are related with BIS and BAS, as hypothesized by leading theories. Also of interest was whether these three withdrawal subtypes are related uniquely to different theore...

While the psychosocial difficulties associated with one specific type of social withdrawal, shyness, have been extensively studied, less is known about the correlates of other subtypes, such as preference-for-solitude. Of the existing studies on withdrawal subtypes, few focus on the emerging adulthood developmental period, and none have examined po...

Very little empirical attention has been paid to other-sex crush experiences during adolescence. As a result, it is not known whether such experiences, which appear to be relatively common, impact psychological adjustment outcomes. This two-wave (3 month interval) longitudinal study of 268 young adolescents (48 % girls; M age at Time 1 = 11.84 year...

Triangulation is a family-wide process in which children are inappropriately involved in interparental conflict, placing them at heightened risk for adjustment problems. A common form of triangulation occurs by parents pressuring their children to take sides, which may result in feelings of being torn between parents. Externalizing behaviors in par...

The authors examined the associations between mixed-grade rejection (rejection by peers in a different school grade), anxious-withdrawal, aggression, and psychological adjustment in a middle school setting. Participants were 181 seventh-grade and 180 eighth-grade students (M age = 13.20 years, SD = 0.68 years) who completed peer nomination and self...

The association between relational aggression and popularity during early adolescence is well established. Yet, little is known about why, exactly, relationally aggressive young adolescents are able to achieve and maintain high popular status among peers. The present study investigated the mediating role of humor in the association between relation...