Jennifer S Silk
Biographic Data
| ID | 188823 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer S Silk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer S |
| FAMILY NAME | Silk |
| SIGNATURE | SILK J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8638-4337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 331 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 40 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Intimate disclosure in online‐only friendships predicts adolescents' depressive symptoms
Adolescents frequently use social media to form online-only friendships (OOFs; i.e., friendships that are exclusive to digital platforms), raising questions about their emotional impact. While OOFs may provide social support and increase well-being, they could also displace in-person relationships or increase exposure to online risks. This study examined longitudinal associations between OOFs, intimate disclosure within these friendships, and dep…
The Role of Interpersonal Characteristics in Early and Developing Therapeutic Alliance Among Periadolescents with Anxiety
Little work has examined associations between interpersonal factors and changes in the therapeutic alliance. We examined the association between baseline youth family and peer interpersonal characteristics and therapeutic alliance throughout treatment in a sample of anxious youths who received cognitive behavioral therapy or client-centered therapy. Youths (N = 135; M = 10.94; SD = 1.46) were in a randomized clinical trial for anxiety disorders. …
Feeling socially connected to others is linked to better emotion regulation in adolescent girls' daily lives
Developing effective emotion regulation ability to manage negative emotion (NE) is critical during adolescence. Social baseline theory posits social connectedness may impact adolescents' everyday emotion regulation. This study examined the relation between social connectedness and NE after a negative social interaction (emotion regulation) and whether contextual factors moderate the association. Adolescent girls (N = 114; M age = 12.26, SD = 0.8)…
School‐related worries in the day‐to‐day lives of early adolescent females
There is currently a mental health epidemic among adolescents, with record high rates of depression, particularly among females. Although many potential causes of this epidemic have been suggested, very little attention has been paid to the school context, despite the fact that academic pressures have increased in recent decades. Intense pressure to excel is thought to play a role in the development of depression, but little is known about how wo…
Targeted Sleep Enhancement Reduces Residual Anxiety Symptoms in Peri-Adolescents Previously Treated for Anxiety Disorders
More time awake after sleep onset is linked to reduced ventral striatum response to rewards in youth with anxiety
BACKGROUND: Poor sleep and anxiety disorders are highly comorbid in youth, and each predicts altered ventral striatum (VS) response to rewards, which may impact mental health risk. Contrasting evidence suggests previously reported negative associations between sleep health and VS response may be stronger or weaker in youth with anxiety, indicating sensitivity to win/loss information or blunted reward processing, respectively. We cross-sectionally…
Adolescents’ Hormonal Responses to Social Stress and Associations with Adolescent Social Anxiety and Maternal Comfort
Displays of negative facial affect during parent–adolescent conflict and the bidirectional transmission of social anxiety
BACKGROUND: Symptoms of social anxiety rise rapidly during adolescence, particularly for girls. Pervasive displays of parental negative affect may increase adolescents' fear of negative evaluation (FNE), thereby increasing risk for social anxiety symptoms. Adolescent displays of negative affect may also exacerbate parents' social anxiety symptoms (via FNE of their child or their parenting skills), yet little research has tested transactional path…
Picture perfect during a pandemic? Body image concerns and depressive symptoms in U.S. adolescent girls during the Covid-19 lockdown
The stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted U.S. adolescents’ lives in numerous ways during the spring of 2020, including substantial changes to in-person routines and increased reliance on digital media. For adolescent girls, stay-at-home practices may have implications for body image concerns. In this research brief, we examine adolescent girls’ pandemic-related body image concerns and longitudinal associations with depressive sy…
Exploring the Impact of Maternal and Paternal Acceptance on Adolescent Girls’ Emotion Regulation
Into the Unknown
The parent–adolescent relationship is important for adolescents’ emotion regulation (ER), yet little is known regarding the neural patterns of dyadic ER that occur during parent–adolescent interactions. A novel measure that can be used to examine such patterns is cross-brain connectivity (CBC)—concurrent and time-lagged connectivity between two individuals’ brain regions. This study sought to provide evidence of CBC and explore associations betwe…
Interpretation Bias and Anticipated Distress in the Face of Ambiguity
Changes in Affective Network Variability Among Youth Treated for Anxiety Disorders
Peer Connectedness and Pre‐Existing Social Reward Processing Predicts U.S. Adolescent Girls’ Suicidal Ideation During Covid‐19
There is major concern about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent suicidal ideation (SI) and peer relationships. We investigated (1) rates of SI and (2) the extent to which peer connectedness and pre-existing neural activation to social reward predicted SI during the initial stay-at-home orders of the pandemic (April-May 2020) in a longitudinal sample of adolescent girls (N = 93; M age = 15.06; 69% White non-Hispanic). Daily diary an…
The Impact of Television, Electronic Games, and Social Technology Use on Sleep and Health in Adolescents with an Evening Circadian Preference
Adolescent Perspectives on How an Adjunctive Mobile App for Social Anxiety Treatment Impacts Treatment Engagement in Telehealth Group Therapy
Adjunctive mobile mental health apps to supplement mental health treatment have been growing in recent years given their ability to address treatment engagement barriers. However, few studies have explicitly examined how these mobile apps impact treatment engagement, and even fewer have investigated this topic through adolescents' perspectives. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five adolescents who used an adjunctive mobil…
Social media use predicts later sleep timing and greater sleep variability
INTRODUCTION: Social media (SM) use has been increasingly recognized as a potential contributor to poor sleep. Few studies have examined SM use and sleep using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), compared different types of media use (SM, television, gaming), or examined whether youth at high and low familial risk for depression are differentially affected by SM use. METHODS: The current study included 76 youth (46% female; Mean age = 11.28 ye…
How anxious is too anxious? State and trait physiological arousal predict anxious youth’s treatment response to brief cognitive behavioral therapy
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02259036
A review of associations between parental emotion socialization behaviors and the neural substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in youth
As highlighted by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998), parents play a critical role in children's socioemotional development, in part, by shaping how children and adolescents process, respond to, and regulate their emotions (i.e., emotional reactivity/regulation). Although evidence for associations between parenting behavior and youth's emotional processing has relied primarily on behavioral measures of emotion, researchers have begun to ex…
Longitudinal links between maternal and peer emotion socialization and adolescent girls’ socioemotional adjustment
Although research has demonstrated that both parents and peers influence adolescent development, it is not clear whether these relationships also serve as contexts for emotion socialization. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated whether maternal and peer emotion socialization were related to adolescent girls' daily emotions, emotion regulation, and social and emotional adjustment. The sample included 160 adolescent girls from low-inc…
Suicidal Ideation Among Anxious Youth
Attention to Peer Feedback Through the Eyes of Adolescents with a History of Anxiety and Healthy Adolescents
Context and dynamics
Despite much research and progress in understanding the development of emotion regulation over the past 3 decades, there is still much to be understood about how developing individuals modulate their affect as they go about their daily life. The papers in this special issue highlight context and dynamics as 2 important intersecting foci for future developmental research on emotion regulation. Ecological momentary assessment, passive sensing, and …
Adolescent Gaze-Directed Attention During Parent–Child conflict
Adolescent Brain Development
This special section focuses on research that utilizes neuroimaging methods to examine the impact of social relationships and socioemotional development on adolescent brain function. Studies include novel neuroimaging methods that further our understanding of adolescent brain development. This special section has a particular focus on how study findings add to our understanding of risk and resilience. In this introduction to the special section, …
The Role of the Family Context in the Development of Emotion Regulation
This article reviews current literature examining associations between components of the family context and children and adolescents' emotion regulation (ER). The review is organized around a tripartite model of familial influence. Firstly, it is posited that children learn about ER through observational learning, modeling and social referencing. Secondly, parenting practices specifically related to emotion and emotion management affect ER. Third…
Psychological Control and Autonomy Granting
This article explores the relationship between parental psychological control and parental autonomy granting, and the relations between these constructs and indicators of adolescent psychosocial functioning, in a sample of 9,564 adolescents from grades 9 to 12. Participants completed a comprehensive parenting questionnaire as well as several measures of psychosocial adjustment. Confirmatory factor analyses of the parenting items revealed discrete…
The influence of mother–child emotion regulation strategies on children's expression of anger and sadness
In a sample of 153 children from preschool through second grade, relations between the use of emotion regulation strategy and children's expression of anger and sadness were coded during an observational task in which children were intentionally disappointed in the presence of the mother. Multilevel modeling was used to examine strategy use and current and subsequent expressions of anger and sadness. Results indicate that mothers' use of attentio…
Longitudinal links between maternal and peer emotion socialization and adolescent girls’ socioemotional adjustment
Although research has demonstrated that both parents and peers influence adolescent development, it is not clear whether these relationships also serve as contexts for emotion socialization. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated whether maternal and peer emotion socialization were related to adolescent girls' daily emotions, emotion regulation, and social and emotional adjustment. The sample included 160 adolescent girls from low-inc…
Parental Psychological Control and Adolescent Adjustment
Psychological control is negatively associated with adolescent adjustment, particularly among adolescents who have difficulty regulating emotions. Emotion regulation is one mechanism through which psychological control is linked to adolescent adjustment, particularly anger dysregulation, and this pattern holds for both younger and older adolescents and for both boys and girls
Temperamental Vulnerability and Negative Parenting as Interacting Predictors of Child Adjustment
This study examines parenting by temperament interactions in predicting child adjustment. Participants included 40 first and second graders, their mothers, and teachers. Child report of maternal psychological control and hostility was assessed using the Child Puppet Interview. Mothers completed temperament scales from the Child Behavior Questionnaire, and teachers provided information on child adjustment. As expected, among children high in irrit…
Trajectories of Internalizing Symptoms From Early Childhood to Adolescence
Despite the great number of children affected by anxiety and depression, developmental trajectories of internalizing disorders are not well understood. The current study applied a group‐based modeling approach to examine the interplay between the temperamental trait of negative emotionality and parenting on internalizing symptoms from early childhood to adolescence. Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Stud…
Peer Connectedness and Pre‐Existing Social Reward Processing Predicts U.S. Adolescent Girls’ Suicidal Ideation During Covid‐19
There is major concern about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent suicidal ideation (SI) and peer relationships. We investigated (1) rates of SI and (2) the extent to which peer connectedness and pre-existing neural activation to social reward predicted SI during the initial stay-at-home orders of the pandemic (April-May 2020) in a longitudinal sample of adolescent girls (N = 93; M age = 15.06; 69% White non-Hispanic). Daily diary an…
Context and dynamics
Despite much research and progress in understanding the development of emotion regulation over the past 3 decades, there is still much to be understood about how developing individuals modulate their affect as they go about their daily life. The papers in this special issue highlight context and dynamics as 2 important intersecting foci for future developmental research on emotion regulation. Ecological momentary assessment, passive sensing, and …
Prefrontal Cortical Response to Negative Social Words Links Social Risk to Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence
Research suggests that altered emotion processing may be one important pathway linking social risk factors and depressive symptoms. We examined the extent to which neural response to negatively valenced social information might help to account for the relationship between social risk and depressive symptoms in youth. Forty-nine youth were scanned while identifying the emotional valence of words that connoted social status. They also completed que…
Maternal Affective Expression and Adolescents' Subjective Experience of Positive Affect in Natural Settings
This study investigated the association between maternal affective expression during laboratory-based interaction tasks and adolescents' experience of positive affect (PA) in natural settings. Participants were 80 healthy adolescents and their mothers. Durations of maternal positive (PA) and negative affective (NA) expressions were observed during a conflict resolution task and a positive event planning interaction task. Ecological momentary asse…
Adolescent Perspectives on How an Adjunctive Mobile App for Social Anxiety Treatment Impacts Treatment Engagement in Telehealth Group Therapy
Adjunctive mobile mental health apps to supplement mental health treatment have been growing in recent years given their ability to address treatment engagement barriers. However, few studies have explicitly examined how these mobile apps impact treatment engagement, and even fewer have investigated this topic through adolescents' perspectives. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five adolescents who used an adjunctive mobil…
Linking Maternal Socialization of Emotion Regulation to Adolescents’ Co-rumination With Peers
Mounting research supports that co-rumination, the tendency to seek peer support by engaging in extensive negatively focused discussion, is a risk factor for adolescent psychopathology. It is unclear, though, how this interpersonal tendency develops. Parental responses to adolescents' negative affect likely shape how youth utilize peer relationships to regulate distress, as they shift to reliance on peer support during this developmental stage. F…
Temperamental Vulnerability and Negative Parenting as Interacting Predictors of Child Adjustment
This study examines parenting by temperament interactions in predicting child adjustment. Participants included 40 first and second graders, their mothers, and teachers. Child report of maternal psychological control and hostility was assessed using the Child Puppet Interview. Mothers completed temperament scales from the Child Behavior Questionnaire, and teachers provided information on child adjustment. As expected, among children high in irrit…
Adolescents' Emotion Regulation in Daily Life
This study examined links between emotion regulation and adjustment in a sample of 152 adolescents in Grades 7 (M age=12) and 10 (M age=15). Emotion regulation was assessed using the experience sampling method, in which adolescents provided multiple reports about the intensity, lability, and strategies used to regulate negative emotions across 1 week. Adolescents also completed self-report measures of adjustment. Adolescents who reported more int…
Psychological Control and Autonomy Granting
This article explores the relationship between parental psychological control and parental autonomy granting, and the relations between these constructs and indicators of adolescent psychosocial functioning, in a sample of 9,564 adolescents from grades 9 to 12. Participants completed a comprehensive parenting questionnaire as well as several measures of psychosocial adjustment. Confirmatory factor analyses of the parenting items revealed discrete…
The Role of the Family Context in the Development of Emotion Regulation
This article reviews current literature examining associations between components of the family context and children and adolescents' emotion regulation (ER). The review is organized around a tripartite model of familial influence. Firstly, it is posited that children learn about ER through observational learning, modeling and social referencing. Secondly, parenting practices specifically related to emotion and emotion management affect ER. Third…
Fearful faces influence attentional control processes in anxious youth and adults
This study examined the effects of trait anxiety and age on performance of an emotional working memory task designed to investigate attentional control processes in the context of emotion. Participants included children, adolescents, and adults (8-30 years old). They performed the Emotional Face N-Back (EFNBACK) task, a modified n-back working memory task with four emotional distracter types (no picture, neutral, fearful, and happy) and two memor…
A Longitudinal Study of Childhood Depression and Anxiety in Relation to Weight Gain
Impact of Inflammatory Bowel Disease and High-Dose Steroid Exposure on Pupillary Responses to Negative Information in Pediatric Depression
OBJECTIVE: To better understand emotional information processing in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and its relationship with depression. Pediatric IBD is associated with higher rates of depression than seen in other physical diseases and in community samples. In systemic inflammation, proinflammatory cytokines have been implicated in altering activity in brain regions known to affect emotion processing and emotion regulation in depres…
The influence of mother–child emotion regulation strategies on children's expression of anger and sadness
In a sample of 153 children from preschool through second grade, relations between the use of emotion regulation strategy and children's expression of anger and sadness were coded during an observational task in which children were intentionally disappointed in the presence of the mother. Multilevel modeling was used to examine strategy use and current and subsequent expressions of anger and sadness. Results indicate that mothers' use of attentio…
Parental Psychological Control and Adolescent Adjustment
Psychological control is negatively associated with adolescent adjustment, particularly among adolescents who have difficulty regulating emotions. Emotion regulation is one mechanism through which psychological control is linked to adolescent adjustment, particularly anger dysregulation, and this pattern holds for both younger and older adolescents and for both boys and girls
Trajectories of Internalizing Symptoms From Early Childhood to Adolescence
Despite the great number of children affected by anxiety and depression, developmental trajectories of internalizing disorders are not well understood. The current study applied a group‐based modeling approach to examine the interplay between the temperamental trait of negative emotionality and parenting on internalizing symptoms from early childhood to adolescence. Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Stud…
Depressed Adolescents’ Pupillary Response to Peer Acceptance and Rejection
Heightened emotional reactivity to peer feedback is predictive of adolescents' depression risk. Examining variation in emotional reactivity within currently depressed adolescents may identify subgroups that struggle the most with these daily interactions. We tested whether trait rumination, which amplifies emotional reactions, explained variance in depressed adolescents' physiological reactivity to peer feedback, hypothesizing that rumination wou…
Linking Maternal Socialization of Emotion Regulation to Adolescents’ Co-rumination With Peers
Mounting research supports that co-rumination, the tendency to seek peer support by engaging in extensive negatively focused discussion, is a risk factor for adolescent psychopathology. It is unclear, though, how this interpersonal tendency develops. Parental responses to adolescents' negative affect likely shape how youth utilize peer relationships to regulate distress, as they shift to reliance on peer support during this developmental stage. F…
The Impact of Parenting on Emotion Regulation During Childhood and Adolescence
Regulating emotions well is critical for promoting social and emotional health among children and adolescents. Parents play a prominent role in how children develop emotion regulation. In 2007, Morris et al. proposed a tripartite model suggesting that parents influence children's emotion regulation through three mechanisms: children's observation of parents' emotion regulation, emotion-related parenting practices, and the emotional climate of the…
Maternal Affective Expression and Adolescents' Subjective Experience of Positive Affect in Natural Settings
This study investigated the association between maternal affective expression during laboratory-based interaction tasks and adolescents' experience of positive affect (PA) in natural settings. Participants were 80 healthy adolescents and their mothers. Durations of maternal positive (PA) and negative affective (NA) expressions were observed during a conflict resolution task and a positive event planning interaction task. Ecological momentary asse…
Adolescent Gaze-Directed Attention During Parent–Child conflict
Adolescent Brain Development
This special section focuses on research that utilizes neuroimaging methods to examine the impact of social relationships and socioemotional development on adolescent brain function. Studies include novel neuroimaging methods that further our understanding of adolescent brain development. This special section has a particular focus on how study findings add to our understanding of risk and resilience. In this introduction to the special section, …
Prefrontal Cortical Response to Negative Social Words Links Social Risk to Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence
Research suggests that altered emotion processing may be one important pathway linking social risk factors and depressive symptoms. We examined the extent to which neural response to negatively valenced social information might help to account for the relationship between social risk and depressive symptoms in youth. Forty-nine youth were scanned while identifying the emotional valence of words that connoted social status. They also completed que…
Suicidal Ideation Among Anxious Youth
Attention to Peer Feedback Through the Eyes of Adolescents with a History of Anxiety and Healthy Adolescents
Context and dynamics
Despite much research and progress in understanding the development of emotion regulation over the past 3 decades, there is still much to be understood about how developing individuals modulate their affect as they go about their daily life. The papers in this special issue highlight context and dynamics as 2 important intersecting foci for future developmental research on emotion regulation. Ecological momentary assessment, passive sensing, and …
Social media use predicts later sleep timing and greater sleep variability
INTRODUCTION: Social media (SM) use has been increasingly recognized as a potential contributor to poor sleep. Few studies have examined SM use and sleep using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), compared different types of media use (SM, television, gaming), or examined whether youth at high and low familial risk for depression are differentially affected by SM use. METHODS: The current study included 76 youth (46% female; Mean age = 11.28 ye…
How anxious is too anxious? State and trait physiological arousal predict anxious youth’s treatment response to brief cognitive behavioral therapy
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02259036
A review of associations between parental emotion socialization behaviors and the neural substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in youth
As highlighted by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998), parents play a critical role in children's socioemotional development, in part, by shaping how children and adolescents process, respond to, and regulate their emotions (i.e., emotional reactivity/regulation). Although evidence for associations between parenting behavior and youth's emotional processing has relied primarily on behavioral measures of emotion, researchers have begun to ex…
Longitudinal links between maternal and peer emotion socialization and adolescent girls’ socioemotional adjustment
Although research has demonstrated that both parents and peers influence adolescent development, it is not clear whether these relationships also serve as contexts for emotion socialization. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated whether maternal and peer emotion socialization were related to adolescent girls' daily emotions, emotion regulation, and social and emotional adjustment. The sample included 160 adolescent girls from low-inc…
Into the Unknown
The parent–adolescent relationship is important for adolescents’ emotion regulation (ER), yet little is known regarding the neural patterns of dyadic ER that occur during parent–adolescent interactions. A novel measure that can be used to examine such patterns is cross-brain connectivity (CBC)—concurrent and time-lagged connectivity between two individuals’ brain regions. This study sought to provide evidence of CBC and explore associations betwe…
Psychology (38 works) · Developmental psychology (33 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (32 works) · Clinical Psychology (29 works) · Clinical Psychology (21 works) · Psychiatry (18 works) · Anxiety (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Psychotherapist (13 works)