Brad Nakamura

Objective: To examine self-reported positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) among youth with ADHD (only and comorbid) and other non-ADHD-referred youth in an ethnically diverse clinical sample. Method: Semi-structured interviews identified 80 pure ADHD, 284 ADHD plus one or more comorbidities, and 730 non-ADHD youth (e.g., other diagnoses or no diagnosis). The Positive and Negative Affect Scale-Children (PANAS-C) was used to assess affective states. Results: Even after controlling for the influence of potential confounds, youth with only ADHD reported higher PA and lower NA than other clinic-referred youth. The ADHD-comorbid group reported higher PA than the "non-ADHD" group, but these groups did not differ on level of NA. ADHD subtype did not influence results. Conclusion: Among clinic-referred youth, ADHD is associated with higher levels of PA and when there are no comorbid disorders, lower levels of NA. (J. of Att. Dis. 2013; XX(X) 1-XX).

Hawaii's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division provides a unique illustration of a youth public mental health system with a long and successful history of large-scale quality improvement initiatives. Many advances are linked to flexibly organizing and applying knowledge gained from the scientific literature and move beyond installing a limited number of brand-named treatment approaches that might be directly relevant only to a small handful of system youth. This article takes a knowledge-to-action perspective and outlines five knowledge management strategies currently under way in Hawaii. Each strategy represents one component of a larger coordinated effort at engineering a service system focused on delivering both brand-named treatment approaches and complimentary strategies informed by the evidence base. The five knowledge management examples are (a) a set of modular-based professional training activities for currently practicing therapists, (b) an outreach initiative for supporting youth evidence-based practices training at Hawaii's mental health-related professional programs, (c) an effort to increase consumer knowledge of and demand for youth evidence-based practices, (d) a practice and progress agency performance feedback system, and (e) a sampling of system-level research studies focused on understanding treatment as usual. We end by outlining a small set of lessons learned and a longer term vision for embedding these efforts into the system's infrastructure.

The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a modularized treatment of a specific fear of water for a 14-year-old youth with childhood onset schizophrenia using a multiple-baseline across behaviors design. Treatment included gradual exposure to a hierarchy of feared water-related situations with rewards for successful approximations ranging from looking at water to swimming in a pool. Both parent and youth

ABSTRACT The two-factor model of emotion clarifies the complexities of the relationship between anxiety and depression through their varying associations with positive and negative affect. Although this model’s structure has been studied in children, the lack of parent report measures on model-specific constructs has thus far prevented a multi-informant perspective on the model. Capitalizing on recent advancements in parent report assessment instruments, the present investigation aimed to confirm the two-factor model of emotion per child self-report; expand the model’s applicability to include parent report; and create a combined-informant model with a large number of parent-child dyad pairs (N = 610). Structural equation modeling demonstrated good fit within parent and child informant models, but diminished fit for the multi-informant model. These results suggest a high degree of robustness with respect to informant type. Implications for the integration of multi-informant assessment information are discussed.

Research and practice in school-based mental health (SBMH) typically includes educational variables only as distal outcomes, resulting from improvements in mental health symptoms rather than directly from mental health intervention. Although sometimes appropriate, this approach also has the potential to inhibit the integration of mental health and schools. The current paper applies an existing model of data-driven decision making (Daleiden & Chorpita, 2005) to detail how SBMH can better integrate routine monitoring of school and academic outcomes into four evidence bases: general services research evidence, case histories, local aggregate, and causal mechanisms. The importance of developing new consultation protocols specific to data-driven decision making in SBMH as well as supportive infrastructure (e.g., measurement feedback systems) to support the collection and use of educational data is also described.