Development and Psychopathology

The Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation (MLSRA) is a landmark prospective, longitudinal study of human development focused on a sample of mothers experiencing poverty and their firstborn children. Although the MLSRA pioneered a number of important topics in the area of social and emotional development, it began with the more specific goal of examining the antecedents of child maltreatment. From that foundation and for more than 40 years, the study has produced a significant body of research on the origins, sequelae, and measurement of childhood abuse and neglect...

A long-standing practice in clinical and developmental psychology research on childhood maltreatment has been to consider prospective, official court records to be the gold standard measure of childhood maltreatment and to give less weight to adults' retrospective self-reports of childhood maltreatment, sometimes even treating this data source as invalid. We argue that both formats of assessment - prospective and retrospective - provide important information on childhood maltreatment. Prospective data drawn from court records should not necessarily be considered the superior format, especially considering evidence of structural racism in child welfare...

High-risk pregnancies elevate maternal stress, impacting offspring neurodevelopment and behavior. This study, involving 112 participants, aimed to compare perceived stress, neurodevelopment, and behavior in high-risk and low-risk pregnancies. Two groups, high-risk and low-risk, were assessed during pregnancy for stress using hair cortisol and psychological analysis. At 24 months post-birth, their children's neurodevelopment and behavior were evaluated. Results revealed higher perceived stress and pregnancy-related concerns in high-risk pregnancies, contrasting with low-risk pregnancies...

Parental warmth during the transition from childhood to adolescence is a key protective factor against a host of adolescent problems, including substance use, maladjustment, and diminished well-being. Moreover, adolescents and parents often disagree in their perceptions of parenting quality, and these discrepancies may confer risk for problem outcomes. The current study applies latent profile analysis to a sample of 687 mother-father-6th grade adolescent triads to identify patterns of adolescent-parent convergence and divergence in perceptions of parental warmth...

This study compared two versions of the NICHD Protocol for interviewing young suspected sexual offenders: the Revised Suspect Protocol (RSP) and the Standard Suspect Protocol (SSP). The RSP incorporated relevant evidence-based practices informed by research on the value of (a) effectively explaining the suspects' rights, (b) rapport building and support, and (c) appropriate questioning strategies. Interviewers using the RSP communicated the children's rights more effectively (reading them more often, checking, verifying, and correcting understanding) and provided more support...

Exposure to early life adversity (ELA) is hypothesized to sensitize threat-responsive neural circuitry. This may lead individuals to overestimate threat in the face of ambiguity, a cognitive-behavioral phenotype linked to poor mental health. The tendency to process ambiguity as threatening may stem from difficulty distinguishing between ambiguous and threatening stimuli. However, it is unknown how exposure to ELA relates to neural representations of ambiguous and threatening stimuli, or how processing of ambiguity following ELA relates to psychosocial functioning...

Reactive and control processes - e.g., negative emotionality and immediacy preference - may predict distinct psychopathology trajectories. However, externalizing and internalizing problems change in behavioral manifestation across development and across contexts, thus necessitating the use of different measures and informants across ages. This is the first study that created developmental scales for both internalizing and externalizing problems by putting scores from different informants and measures onto the same scale to examine temperament facets as risk factors...

The current study evaluated cultural values and family processes that may moderate associations between daily racial-ethnic discrimination and distress among Mexican-origin youth. Integrating micro-time (daily diary) and macro-time (longitudinal survey) research design features, we examined familism, family cohesion, and ethnic-racial socialization from youth-, mother-, and father- reports as potential buffers of daily associations between youth racial-ethnic discrimination and youth distress (negative affect and anger)...

Growing evidence supports the unique pathways by which threat and deprivation, two core dimensions of adversity, confer risk for youth psychopathology. However, the extent to which these dimensions differ in their direct associations with youth psychopathology remains unclear. The primary aim of this preregistered meta-analysis was to synthesize the associations between threat, deprivation, internalizing, externalizing, and trauma-specific psychopathology. Because threat is proposed to be directly linked with socioemotional development, we hypothesized that the magnitude of associations between threat and psychopathology would be larger than those with deprivation...

Previous studies show aggression-related structural alterations in frontal and limbic brain regions. Most studies have focused on overall aggression, instead of its subtypes, and on specific regions instead of networks. This study aims to identify both brain networks and regions that are associated with reactive and proactive subtypes of aggression. Structural MRI data were collected from 340 adolescents (125 F/215 M) with a mean age of 16.29 ( SD = 1.20). Aggression symptomology was indexed via the Reactive Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (RPQ)...

Although new mothers are at risk of heightened vulnerability for depressive symptoms, there is limited understanding regarding changes in maternal depressive symptoms over the course of the postpartum and early childhood of their child's life among rural, low-income mothers from diverse racial backgrounds. This study examined distinct trajectories of depressive symptoms among rural low-income mothers during the first five years of their child's life, at 6, 15, 24, and 58 months, using data from the Family Life Project ( N = 1,292)...

Unraveling the neurobiological foundations of childhood maltreatment is important due to the persistent associations with adverse mental health outcomes. However, the mechanisms through which abuse and neglect disturb resting-state network connectivity remain elusive. Moreover, it remains unclear if positive parenting can mitigate the negative impact of childhood maltreatment on network connectivity. We analyzed a cohort of 194 adolescents and young adults (aged 14-25, 47.42% female) from the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN) to investigate the impact of childhood abuse and neglect on resting-state network connectivity...

The present study examined the longitudinal associations between three dimensions of temperament - activity, affect-extraversion, and task orientation - and childhood aggression. Using 131 monozygotic and 173 dizygotic (86 same-sex) twin pairs from the Louisville Twin Study, we elucidated the ages, from 6 to 36 months, at which each temperament dimension began to correlate with aggression at age 7. We employed latent growth modeling to show that developmental increases (i.e., slopes) in activity were positively associated with aggression, whereas increases in affect-extraversion and task orientation were negatively associated with aggression...

Limited analyses based on national samples have assessed whether early attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms predict later internalizing and externalizing symptoms in youth and the influence of sex and pubertal timing on subsequent psychiatric symptoms. This study analyzed data ( n = 2818) from the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program national cohort. Analyses used data from early childhood (mean age = 5.3 years) utilizing parent-reported ADHD symptoms to predict rates of internalizing and externalizing symptoms from late childhood/adolescence (mean age = 11...

BACKGROUND: Employing a developmental psychopathology framework, we tested the utility of the hormesis model in examining the strengthening of children and youth through limited levels of adversity in relation to internalizing and externalizing outcomes within a brain-by-development context. METHODS: Analyzing data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study ( N = 11,878), we formed latent factors of threat, deprivation, and unpredictability. We examined linear and nonlinear associations between adversity dimensions and youth psychopathology symptoms and how change of resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) in the default mode network (DMN) from Time 1 to Time 5 moderates these associations...

Friendships are a potential factor that influence maltreated children's risk for psychopathology. This systematic review examined (1) how friendships influence the association between child maltreatment and psychopathology and (2) developmental differences in how friendships influence this association. Four databases were searched. Inclusion criteria were primary study, quantitative, measures of maltreatment and friendship up to the age of 18 years, measures of psychopathology up to the age of 24 years, and a non-maltreated sample...

Since its launch in a 1984 Special Issue of Child Development, significant contributions and insights have followed that have expanded our understanding of psychopathology and normal human growth and development. Despite these efforts, there are persistent and under-analyzed skewed patterns of vulnerability across and within groups. The persistence of a motivated forgetfulness to acknowledge citizens' uneven access to resources and supports, or as stated elsewhere, "inequality presence denial," is, at minimum, a policy, social and health practice problem...

The field of developmental psychopathology has grown exponentially over the past decades, and has become increasingly multifaceted. The initial focus on understanding abnormal child psychology has broadened to the study of the origins of psychopathology, with the goals of preventing and alleviating disorder and promoting healthy development. In this paper, we discuss how technological advances and global events have expanded the questions that researchers in developmental psychopathology can address. We do so by describing a longitudinal study that we have been conducting for the past dozen years...

The body of scientific knowledge accumulated by the scholarly disciplines such as Developmental Psychopathology can achieve meaningful public impact if wielded and used in policy decision-making. Scientific study of how policymakers use research evidence underscores the need for researchers' policy engagement; however, barriers in the academy create conditions in which there is a need for infrastructure that increases the feasibility of researchers' partnership with policymakers. This need led to the development of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration model, a systematic approach for developing "boundary spanning" infrastructure, which has been experimentally tested and shown to improve policymakers' use of research evidence and bolster researchers' policy skills and engagement...

A central goal in the field of developmental psychopathology is to evaluate the complex, dynamic transactions occurring among biological, psychological, and broader social-cultural contexts that predict adaptive and maladaptive outcomes across ontogeny. Here, I briefly review research on the effects of a history of childhood maltreatment on parental, child, and dyadic functioning, along with more recent studies on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Because the experience and sequelae of child maltreatment and the intergenerational transmission of trauma are embedded in complex biopsychosocial contexts, this research is best conceptualized in a developmental psychopathology framework...