The Clinical Diagnosis/Behavioral Assessment Core (Core C) will be responsible for ensuring that a commonset of age appropriate, interview, behavioral, and diagnostic measures are used in all projects that employhuman subjects.
The aims of Projects 2 and 3 are highly complementary; thus, they employ similar protocolsfor the laboratory visits done in the late adolescent age period.As a central activity, the core will conduct structured diagnostic interviews by licensed clinicians on selectgroups of participants, thus following up on diagnoses made earlier in these longitudinal studies andbenefiting Projects 2, 3, 4, and 5. These K-SADS interviews will allow results to be assimilated to theliterature on anxiety disorders as defined by DSM-IV. The presence or absence of clinical diagnoses willprominently figure into addressing scientific aims on Projects 2, 3, 4, and 5. Core C will pay for diagnosticinterviews and manage the resulting data.Projects 2 and 3 will screen their entire samples for behavioral problems in late adolescence, with theMacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire (HBQ) as the main screening instrument. The projects willconduct this screening, but Core C will manage the resulting data in a uniform manner and facilitate analysesacross projects.The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) figures prominently in both Project 2 and 3, and relates conceptuallyto all projects. Core 2 will facilitate uniform administration of the TSST and conduct behavioral coding ofvideotapes taken during the TSST. The development and implementation of a coding scheme for affect andbehavior during the TSST will be an innovative contribution of Core C.Finally, with our consultant Dr. Kraemer on Project 2, the Core will publish methodological papers on twotopics: (1) Clarifying the relationship between categorical field diagnoses of child psychopathology and priorand concurrent dimensional symptom scores from the HBQ and other measures using Receiver OperatingCharacteristic (ROC) curve approaches. Many developmental factors will be incorporated into theseanalyses. (2) Examining the psychometric quality of instruments used in the assessment protocols. Theselatter measures capture key risk factors for adolescent anxiety.
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