The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the health behaviors of people around the world, including their physical activity patterns. Intuitive exercise, a facet of one’s relationship with physical activity, is defined as one’s awareness, mindset (positive versus negative), and mindfulness when engaged in movement. The study’s purpose was to explore whether self-reported physical activity and psychological mindsets around exercise changed during the pandemic. College students (n = 216) described their relationship with exercise before and during the pandemic through anonymous completion of the Intuitive Exercise Scale (IEXS) and open-ended questions to provide in-depth contextualized responses about exercise habits. Participants reported significantly higher scores on intuitive exercise during the pandemic, such as on the Body Trust subscale (M = 3.43), compared to pre-pandemic levels (M = 3.20), p < 0.001. Moreover, varied themes related to physical activity were uncovered such as exercising for fun, exercise influenced by emotion, and loss of motivation to exercise. Important takeaways of the study include the diversity of responses to the pandemic (i.e., some participants reported an increase in physical activity levels and more positive exercise attitudes while others experienced the opposite), the need to promote self-care, and the need for positive coping strategies.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and potentially traumatic events (PTEs) contribute to increased substance use, mental health issues, and cognitive impairments. However, there's not enough research on how TBI and PTEs combined impact mental heath, substance use, and neurocognition. This study leverages a subset of The National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA) multi-site dataset with 551 adolescents to assess the combined and distinctive impacts of TBI, PTEs, and TBI+PTEs (prior to age 18) on substance use, mental health, and neurocognitive outcomes at age 18. TBI, PTEs, and TBI+PTEs predicted greater lifetime substance use and past-year alcohol and cannabis use. PTEs predicted greater internalizing symptoms, while TBI+PTEs predicted greater externalizing symptoms. Varying effects on neurocognitive outcomes included PTEs influencing attention accuracy and TBI+PTEs predicting faster speed in emotion tasks. PTEs predicted greater accuracy in abstraction-related tasks. Associations with working memory were not detected. This exploratory study contributes to the growing literature on the complex interplay between TBI, PTEs, and adolescent mental health, substance use, and neurocognition. The developmental implications of trauma via TBIs and/or PTEs during adolescence are considerable and worthy of further investigation.

While school nurses are well-positioned to mitigate suicide risk in students, few studies have reported on their role in prevention. Using an online Qualtrics survey, school nurses ( N = 1,283) from across the United States were surveyed to examine their role, practices, and interventions regarding youth suicide prevention. Findings reveal that varied and exclusive practices exist within K-12 schools. The majority of school nurses are not included in district suicide risk protocols or interdisciplinary mental health team meetings, and they also report a lack of communication and collaboration between them and other in-school clinicians. Despite this exclusivity, many school nurses identify students at risk and connect them to mental health services. District leaders are encouraged to leverage the skillset of school nurses as members of the mental health team by advocating for school nurse inclusivity in both district- and school-level suicide prevention and intervention policies and practices.

Contemporary school nursing practice increasingly emphasizes the role of school nurses in supporting student mental health through interdisciplinary collaboration. Using data from a national online survey of school nurses (n = 1,283), this study examined associations among caseload, collaborative practice, and moral distress related to school-based suicide prevention. Serving a greater number of schools was associated with lower levels of collaboration with school-based mental health professionals. Lower levels of collaboration were associated with a higher likelihood of experiencing moral distress, suggesting that collaborative challenges may reflect broader workload constraints. Although caseload size was not directly associated with severity of moral distress, findings suggest that workload demands may contribute indirectly to moral distress through collaborative engagement. Attention to workforce structures alongside strengthening opportunities for collaborative practice may be important for addressing moral distress and supporting school nurses’ participation in student mental healthcare.

This research endeavor aims to measure and examine the phenomena of shooter bias using virtual reality. Shooter bias is a form of implicit bias when an individual has attitudes toward people or associates stereotypes with them without that individual’s conscious knowledge. We posit that virtual reality is a uniquely powerful tool for studying shooter bias because it allows complete control over what participants see and facilitates precise data collection. For this study, we used eye-tracking. We examine what participants looked at during a series of virtual decision tasks with the intention of correlating this information with the phenomena of shooter bias. Our results provide some insights into detecting moments of shooter bias in the virtual environment. Experimental results indicate that participants spent more time looking at Black virtual human (VH) agents over White virtual human agents and took longer to make decisions when the agent of interest was Black.