In the United States, adolescents are routinely prescribed opioids for management of pain. Data suggest that early opioid use, even via a legitimate prescription, can increase risk for opioid misuse. There are surprisingly little data on the nature of pain medication prescribing within pediatric medical settings and adolescent outcomes despite this being the place most youth are introduced to prescription opioids. To address this gap, the current study recruited n = 139 adolescents ages 14-18 years who were prescribed opioid medications for acute noncancer pain in pediatric outpatient medical settings. Data on opioid use and mood symptoms were obtained via daily diaries and self-report measures. The majority of youth (90.9%) filled the opioid prescription, and of those who used those opioids, the frequency of use varied widely (10-100% of days). There were no gender differences in the percent of opioid use days, despite females reporting higher pain and mood symptoms than males. Greater pain experiences and the number of pills prescribed were positively associated with opioid use as reported in daily diaries. As hypothesized, higher depressive symptoms were associated with greater opioid use. Higher daily reports of worried or scared affect were associated with lower opioid use. Findings contribute to our understanding of adolescent opioid use following prescription in a pediatric outpatient medical setting. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Chronic pain is considered a public health crisis due to its high prevalence, impact, costs, and disparities in pain prevalence and treatment. In parallel, drug overdose, particularly due to opioids, has become an epidemic in the United States, prompting a public health crisis concerning harms associated with both prescribed opioid therapy for chronic pain and illicit opioid use. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight state-of-the-art psychological research that addresses the combined issues of chronic pain and harms associated with opioids. Articles included in this special issue focus on 2 related areas. The 1st set of innovative articles focuses on risk factors for chronic pain, characterization of patterns of opioid use and misuse, assessment of opioid risk, and identification of moderating factors in populations ranging from adolescents to older adults. The 2nd set of articles includes exemplary research on psychological approaches for management of chronic pain and opioid risk mitigation; integration of psychological approaches in patient-centered, evidence-based, multimodal and interdisciplinary plans of pain care; and treatment of co-occurring chronic pain and opioid use disorder. Last, the issue includes a guest editorial highlighting psychological research and the participation of psychologists in the National Institutes of Health's Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) initiative. In this introduction, the guest editors highlight the objectives in this special issue are to stimulate additional research to develop psychological approaches to reduce opioid misuse behaviors, to help educate providers on opioid prescribing that is equitable and minimizes risk of harms, and to address co-occurring chronic pain and opioid use disorder in vulnerable populations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).The social environment provides a sampling space for making informed inferences about features of the world at large, such as the distribution of preferences, risks, behaviors, or other events. How do people search this sampling space and make inferences based on the instances sampled? Inspired by existing models of bounded rationality and in accord with research on the structure of social memory, we develop and test the social-circle model, a parameterized, probabilistic process account of how people make inferences about relative event frequencies. The model extends to social sampling the idea that cognitive search is both structured and limited; moreover, it captures individual differences in the order in which sections of the sampling space are probed, in difference thresholds, and in response error. Using a hierarchical Bayesian latent-mixture approach, we submit the model to a rigorous model comparison. In Study 1, a reanalysis of published data, the social-circle model outperformed both a model assuming exhaustive search and a simple heuristic assuming no individual differences in search or difference thresholds. Study 2 establishes the robustness of these findings in a different domain and across age groups (adults and children). We find that children also consult their social memories for inferential purposes and rely on sequential and limited search. Finally, model and parameter recovery analyses (Study 3) demonstrate the ability of the social-circle model to recover the characteristics of the cognitive processes assumed to underlie social sampling. Our analyses establish that social sampling in both children and adults follows key principles of bounded rationality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Positive social connections improve wellbeing. Technology increasingly affords a wide variety of media that people can use to connect with others, but not all media strengthen social connection equally. Optimizing wellbeing, therefore, requires choosing how to connect with others wisely. We predicted that people's preferences for communication media would be at least partly guided by the expected costs and benefits of the interaction-specifically, how awkward or uncomfortable the interaction would be and how connected they would feel to their partner-but that people's expectations would consistently undervalue the overall benefit of more intimate voice-based interactions. https://www.selleckchem.com/peptide/pmx-205.html We tested this hypothesis by asking participants in a field experiment to reconnect with an old friend either over the phone or e-mail, and by asking laboratory participants to "chat" with a stranger over video, voice, or text-based media. Results indicated that interactions including voice (phone, video chat, and voice chat) created stronger social bonds and no increase in awkwardness, compared with interactions including text (e-mail, text chat), but miscalibrated expectations about awkwardness or connection could lead to suboptimal preferences for text-based media.