This study used a structural equation mixture model to examine associations between child maltreatment, polygenic risk, and indices of adaptive functioning. Children aged 6 to 13 years (N = 1,004), half maltreated, half nonmaltreated, were recruited to attend a research day camp. Multi-informant indicators of prosocial behavior, antisocial behavior, withdrawn behavior, and depression were collected and used in a latent class analysis. Four classes emerged, characterizing “well-adjusted,” “externalizing,” “internalizing,” and “socially dominant” groups. Twelve genetic variants, previously reported in the Gene × Environment literature, were modeled as one weighted polygenic risk score. Large main effects between maltreatment and adaptive functioning were observed (Wald = 35.3, df = 3, p < .0001), along with evidence of a small Gene × Environment effect (Wald = 13.5, df = 3, p = .004), adjusting for sex, age, and covariate interaction effects.

Maltreatment increases risk for psychopathology in childhood and adulthood, thus identifying mechanisms that influence these associations is necessary for future prevention and intervention. Emotion dysregulation resulting from maltreatment is one potentially powerful mechanism explaining risk for psychopathology. This study tests a conceptual model that distinguishes deprivation and threat as distinct forms of exposure with different pathways to psychopathology. Here we operationalize threat as exposure to physical and/or sexual abuse and deprivation as exposure to neglect. We test the hypothesis that threat and deprivation differentially predict use of avoidant strategies and total regulation. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Studies on Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN study; N = 866), which followed high-risk children from age 4 to 18. At age 6, children and their parents reported on adversity exposure. Case records documented exposure to abuse and neglect. At 18, adolescents reported on regulation strategies and psychopathology. Regression analyses indicated that greater exposure to threat, but not deprivation, predicted greater use of avoidant strategies in adolescence. Moreover, avoidance partially mediated the longitudinal association between exposure to threat in early childhood and symptoms of internalizing psychopathology in adolescence. Results suggest that abuse and neglect differentially predict regulation strategy use and that regulation strategy use predicts psychopathology.

Findings as to whether individuals’ experiences of physical maltreatment from their parents in childhood predict their own perpetration of physical maltreatment toward their children in adulthood are mixed. Whether the maltreatment experienced is severe versus moderate or mild may relate to the strength of intergenerational associations. Furthermore, understanding of the roles of possible mediators (intervening mechanisms linking these behaviors) and moderators of the intervening mechanisms (factors associated with stronger or weaker mediated associations) is still relatively limited. These issues were examined in the present study. Mediating mechanisms based on a social learning model included antisocial behavior as assessed by criminal behaviors and substance use (alcohol and drug use), and the extent to which parental angry temperament moderated any indirect effects of antisocial behavior was also examined. To address these issues, data were used from Generations 2 and 3 of a prospective three-generational study, which is an extension of the Oregon Youth Study. Findings indicated modest intergenerational associations for severe physical maltreatment. There was a significant association of maltreatment history, particularly severe maltreatment with mothers’ and fathers’ delinquency. However, neither delinquency nor substance use showed significant mediational effects, and parental anger as a moderator of mediation did not reach significance.

We tested the hypothesis that high activity levels in infancy would predict self-regulatory problems and later symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a longitudinal study of British families (N = 321). Infants’ activity levels were assessed at 6 months, using 3 informants’ reports from the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) and ActiGraphs during baseline, attention, and restraint tasks. At a mean of 33 months, the children were assessed on self-regulatory tasks; at a mean of 36 months, 3 informants reported symptoms of ADHD. At a mean of 7.0 years, the children were assessed on executive function tasks; 3 informants reported on the child's symptoms of ADHD; and diagnoses of disorder were obtained using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment. Informants’ reports of high activity levels at 6 months predicted ADHD symptoms in early childhood and diagnoses of ADHD with clinical impairment at age 7. The IBQ activity scale was also associated with the children's later performance on self-regulation tasks in early and middle childhood. Activity level in infancy reflects normal variation and is not a sign of psychopathology; however, these findings suggest that further study of the correlates of high activity level in infancy may help identify those children most at risk for disorder.

Maltreatment during childhood is associated with difficult interpersonal relationships throughout the life course. The aim of the current study was to investigate differential pathways from child maltreatment to emerging adult relationship dysfunction. Specifically, we prospectively tested whether child maltreatment initiates a developmental cascade resulting in coercive negative romantic and friend interactions in emerging adulthood via childhood antisocial tendencies and via childhood relational aggression. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of emerging adult participants (N = 392; mean age = 20 years old) who took part in a summer research camp program as children (mean age = 11 years old), results supported pathways via both childhood antisocial behavior and childhood relational aggression. We found specificity within these pathways such that childhood antisocial behavior was a mediator of child maltreatment effects on emerging adult negative romantic interactions, whereas childhood relational aggression was a mediator of child maltreatment effects on emerging adult negative friend interactions. Taken together, results indicate that children exposed to maltreatment face significant interpersonal challenges in emerging adulthood, within both the friend and the romantic domains, and point to distinct childhood pathways to these negative interactions. Our findings are consistent with Dishion's (2016) theoretical framework for understanding the development of coercion in relationships and highlight the criticality of early intervention with maltreating families.

While emotional dysregulation is a broad construct, the current paper adopts a narrow approach to facilitate translational neuroscience research on pediatric anxiety. The paper first presents data on an adapted version of the antisaccade task and then integrates these data into a research framework. Data on an adapted version of the antisaccade task were collected in 57 youth, including 35 seeking treatment for an anxiety disorder. Associations were examined between performance on the antisaccade task and (a) age, (b) performance on other cognitive-control tasks (i.e., the stop-signal delay and flanker tasks), and (c) level of anxiety symptoms. Better performance on the antisaccade task occurred in older relative to younger subjects and correlated with better performance on the flanker task. Across the 57 youth, higher levels of anxiety correlated with shorter latency for correct antisaccades. These data can be placed within a three-step framework for translational neuroscience research. In the first step, a narrow index of emotion dysregulation is targeted. In the second step, this narrow index is linked to other correlated indicators of the same underlying narrow latent construct. In the third and final step, associations are examined with clinical outcomes and response to treatment.

A low resting heart rate across development from infancy to young adulthood relates to greater aggression/hostility. Adult aggression and a high heart rate relate to health risk. Do some aggressive individuals retain low heart rate and less health risk across development while others show high heart rate and more risk? A longitudinal sample of 203 men assessed as teens (age 16.1) and adults (mean age 32.0) permitted us to assess (a) stability of heart rate levels and reactivity, (b) stability of aggression/hostility, and (c) whether change or stability related to health risk. Adults were assessed with Buss–Perry measures of aggression/hostility; teens with the Zuckerman aggression/hostility measure. Mean resting heart rate, heart rate reactivity to speech preparation, and aggression/hostility were moderately stable across development. Within age periods, mean heart rate level, but not reactivity, was negatively related to hostility/aggression. Maintaining low heart rate into adulthood was related to better health among aggressive individuals relative to those with increasing heart rate into adulthood. Analyses controlled for weight gain, socioeconomic status, race, health habits, and medication. Low heart rate as a characteristic of hostile/aggressive individuals may continue to relate to better health indices in adulthood, despite possible reversal of this relationship with aging.

Adolescence is a period of heightened susceptibility to peer influences, and deviant peer affiliation has well-established implications for the development of psychopathology. However, little is known about the role of brain functions in pathways connecting peer contexts and health risk behaviors. We tested developmental cascade models to evaluate contributions of adolescent risk taking, peer influences, and neurobehavioral variables of risk processing and cognitive control to substance use among 167 adolescents who were assessed annually for four years. Risk taking at Time 1 was related to substance use at Time 4 indirectly through peer substance use at Time 2 and insular activation during risk processing at Time 3. Furthermore, neural cognitive control moderated these effects. Greater insular activation during risk processing was related to higher substance use for those with greater medial prefrontal cortex activation during cognitive control, but it was related to lower substance use among those with lower medial prefrontal cortex activation during cognitive control. Neural processes related to risk processing and cognitive control play a crucial role in the processes linking risk taking, peer substance use, and adolescents’ own substance use.

Using a large and nationally representative sample, we examined how adolescents’ 5-HTTLPR genotype and perceived parenting quality independently and interactively associated with trajectories of alcohol use from early adolescence to young adulthood and whether/how gender may moderate these associations. The sample for this study included 13,749 adolescents (53.3% female; 56.3% non-Hispanic White, 21.5% Black, 16.0% Hispanic, and 6.1% Asian) followed prospectively from adolescence to young adulthood. Using growth mixture modeling, we identified four distinct trajectories of alcohol use (i.e., persistent heavy alcohol use, developmentally limited alcohol use, late-onset heavy alcohol use, and non/light alcohol use). Results indicated that the short allele of 5-HTTLPR was associated with higher risk of membership in the persistent and the late-onset heavy alcohol use trajectories. Parenting quality was associated with lower likelihoods of following the persistent heavy and the developmentally limited alcohol use trajectories but was not associated with risk of membership for the late-onset heavy drinking trajectory. 5-HTTLPR interacted with parenting quality to predict membership in the persistent heavy alcohol use trajectory for males but not for females. Findings highlighted the importance of considering the heterogeneity in trajectories of alcohol use across development and gender in the study of Gene Environment interactions in alcohol use.

Child maltreatment represents a pervasive societal problem. Exposure to maltreatment is predictive of maladjustment across development with enduring negative effects found in adulthood. Compelling evidence suggests that some parents with a history of child abuse and neglect are at elevated risk for the maltreatment of their own children. However, a dearth of research currently exists on mediated mechanisms that may underlie this continuity. Ecological and transactional theories of child maltreatment propose that child maltreatment is multiply determined by various risk factors that exist across different ecological systems. Intimate partner violence (IPV) often co-occurs with child maltreatment and may represent a pathway through which risk for child abuse and neglect is transmitted across generations within a family. Informed by theories on the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment and utilizing a community-based, cross-sectional sample of 245 racially and ethnically diverse, low-income mothers and daughters, the objective of this study was to investigate IPV as a propagating process through which risk of child abuse and neglect is conferred from parent to child. We found evidence suggesting that mothers’ history of maltreatment is associated with both their IPV involvement and their adolescent daughters’ maltreatment victimization (with exposure to IPV as a maltreatment subtype excluded for clarity). Maternal IPV also partially accounted for the continuity of maltreatment victimization from mother to adolescent. A secondary analysis that included the adolescent's own engagement in dating violence provided compelling but preliminary evidence of the emergence of a similar pattern of relational violence, whereby adolescent girls with maltreatment histories were likewise involved in abusive intimate relationships. Future directions and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

As early as infancy, caregivers’ facial expressions shape children's behaviors, help them regulate their emotions, and encourage or dissuade their interpersonal agency. In childhood and adolescence, proficiencies in producing and decoding facial expressions promote social competence, whereas deficiencies characterize several forms of psychopathology. To date, however, studying facial expressions has been hampered by the labor-intensive, time-consuming nature of human coding. We describe a partial solution: automated facial expression coding (AFEC), which combines computer vision and machine learning to code facial expressions in real time. Although AFEC cannot capture the full complexity of human emotion, it codes positive affect, negative affect, and arousal—core Research Domain Criteria constructs—as accurately as humans, and it characterizes emotion dysregulation with greater specificity than other objective measures such as autonomic responding. We provide an example in which we use AFEC to evaluate emotion dynamics in mother–daughter dyads engaged in conflict. Among other findings, AFEC (a) shows convergent validity with a validated human coding scheme, (b) distinguishes among risk groups, and (c) detects developmental increases in positive dyadic affect correspondence as teen daughters age. Although more research is needed to realize the full potential of AFEC, findings demonstrate its current utility in research on emotion dysregulation.

Research suggests intergenerational links between childhood abuse and neglect and subsequent parenting quality, but little is known about the potential mechanisms underlying intergenerational continuities in parenting. Adult romantic functioning may be one plausible mechanism, given its documented associations with both adverse caregiving in childhood and parenting quality in adulthood. The present study used data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation to (a) investigate prospective associations between childhood experiences of abuse and neglect and multiple parenting outcomes in adulthood, and (b) evaluate the degree to which adult romantic functioning mediates those associations. Information regarding childhood abuse and neglect was gathered prospectively from birth through age 17.5 years. Multimethod assessments of romantic functioning were collected repeatedly through early adulthood (ages 20 to 32 years), and parenting quality was assessed as participants assumed a parenting role (ages 21 to 38 years). As expected, childhood abuse and neglect experiences predicted less supportive parenting (observed and interview rated) and higher likelihood of self-reported Child Protective Services involvement. The association with interview-rated supportive parenting was partially mediated by lower romantic competence, whereas the association with Child Protective Services involvement was partially mediated by more relational violence in adult romantic relationships. Implications of these novel prospective findings for research and clinical intervention are discussed.

According to the developmental psychopathology framework, adverse childhood experiences, including child sexual abuse (CSA), may alter the course of normal development in children. Attachment security has been identified as a protective factor against psychopathology and may thus play a critical role in predicting victims’ adaptation. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the mediating effect of attachment representations in the relation between CSA and behavior problems over a 1-year period. The sample consisted of 391 children (251 sexually abused) aged 3.5 to 6 years. The Attachment Story Completion Task and the Child Behavior Checklist were used. Disorganized attachment partially mediated the relation between CSA and children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems 1 year following the initial assessment. This mediation effect was not found for ambivalent nor secure attachment dimensions. Child gender was found to moderate the association between CSA and disorganization, with larger effects of CSA among boys. These findings underscore the importance of considering attachment representations in treatment programs for preschool victims. Evidence-based practice focusing on trauma could be combined with an attachment-based intervention targeting the parent–child relationship. Moreover, interventions should be gender sensitive, as CSA appears to affect boys and girls differently.

Decades of research have highlighted the significance of parenting in children's development, yet few studies have focused specifically on the development of parental monitoring strategies in diverse families living in at-risk neighborhoods. The current study investigated the development of active (i.e., parental discussions and curfew rules) and passive (i.e., child communication with parents) parental monitoring strategies across different developmental periods (middle childhood and adolescence; Grades 4–5 and 7–11) as well as individual (child, parent), family, and contextual antecedents (measured in kindergarten) of this parenting behavior. Using an ecological approach, this study evaluated longitudinal data from 753 participants in the Fast Track Project, a multisite study directed at the development and prevention of conduct problems in at-risk children. Latent trajectory modeling results identified little to no mean growth in these monitoring strategies over time, suggesting that families living in at-risk environments may engage in consistent levels of monitoring strategies to ensure children's safety and well-being. Findings also identified several kindergarten antecedents of the growth factors of these parental monitoring strategies including (a) early child conduct problems; (b) parental warmth/involvement, satisfaction, and efficacy; and (c) parent–child relationship quality. These predictive effects largely highlighted the important role of early parenting behaviors on later levels of and growth in parental monitoring strategies. These findings have important implications for potential prevention and intervention targets to promote the development of parental monitoring strategies among families living in more at-risk contexts.

Children with prenatal tobacco exposure (PTE) exhibit early self-regulatory impairments, reflecting a life-course persistent propensity toward behavioral disinhibition. Previously, we demonstrated the protective role of parental responsiveness for reducing the risk of exposure-related disruptive behavior in adolescence. Here, we expanded this line of inquiry, examining whether responsiveness moderates the relation of PTE to a broader set of behavioral disinhibition features in early childhood and testing alternative diathesis-stress versus differential susceptibility explanatory models. PTE was assessed prospectively using interviews and bioassays in the Midwestern Infant Development Study (MIDS). Mother-child dyads (N = 276) were re-assessed at approximately 5 years of age in a preschool follow-up. We quantified maternal responsiveness and child behavioral disinhibition using a combination of directly observed activities in the lab and developmentally sensitive questionnaires. Results supported a diathesis-stress pattern. Children with PTE and less responsive mothers showed increased disruptive behavior and lower effortful control compared with children without PTE. In contrast, exposed children with more responsive mothers had self-regulatory profiles similar to their non-exposed peers. We did not observe sex differences. Findings provide greater specification of the protective role of maternal responsiveness for self-regulation in children with PTE and help clarify mechanisms that may underscore trajectories of exposure-related behavioral disinhibition.

Childhood exposure to stress can induce prolonged negative effects on health, which in turn confer risks for the next generation, but greater specificity is needed to inform intervention. A first step is to measure individual differences in emotional reactivity to stress early in life in ways that can account for heterogeneity in child exposure. The present study tested the hypothesis that mothers’ childhood exposure to stress would be differentially associated with patterns of positive and negative emotional reactivity in their offspring, suggesting transmission of stress response across generations. Participants were 268 young mothers (age 14–23 years) followed longitudinally since childhood, and their infants aged 3–9 months. Latent class analysis of infant emotions expressed before and during the still-face paradigm yielded five subgroups that varied in valence, intensity, and reactivity. After accounting for sociodemographic factors, infant temperament, and postpartum depression, multinomial regression models showed that, relative to an emotionally regulated still-face response, infants showing low negative reactivity were more likely to have mothers exposed to childhood emotional abuse, and infants showing high and increasing negative reactivity were more likely to have mothers exposed to childhood emotional neglect. Mechanisms by which early maternal stress exposure influences emotional reactivity in offspring are discussed.

Exposure to high levels of postdivorce interparental conflict is a well-documented risk factor for the development of psychopathology, and there is strong evidence of a subpopulation of families for which conflict persists for many years after divorce. However, existing studies have not elucidated differential trajectories of conflict within families over time, nor have they assessed the risk posed by conflict trajectories for development of psychopathology or evaluated potential protective effects of children's coping to mitigate such risk. We used growth mixture modeling to identify longitudinal trajectories of child-reported conflict over a period of six to eight years following divorce in a sample of 240 children. We related the trajectories to children's mental health problems, substance use, and risky sexual behaviors and assessed how children's coping prospectively predicted psychopathology in the different conflict trajectories. We identified three distinct trajectories of conflict; youth in two high-conflict trajectories showed deleterious effects on measures of psychopathology at baseline and the six-year follow-up. We found both main effects of coping and coping by conflict trajectory interaction effects in predicting problem outcomes at the six-year follow-up. The study supports the notion that improving youth's general capacity to cope adaptively is a potentially modifiable protective factor for all children facing parental divorce and that children in families with high levels of postdivorce conflict are a particularly appropriate group to target for coping-focused preventive interventions.

Efforts to differentiate between the developmental sequelae of childhood emotional abuse and childhood emotional neglect are critical to both research and practice efforts. As an oft-identified mechanism of the effects of child maltreatment on later adjustment, emotion dysregulation represents a key potential pathway. The present study explored a higher order factor model of specific emotion regulation skills, and the extent to which these skill sets would indicate distinct developmental pathways from unique emotional maltreatment experiences to multidomain adjustment. A sample of 500 ethnoracially diverse college students reported on their experiences. A two-factor model of emotion regulation skills based on subscales of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale was revealed. Significant indirect effects of childhood emotional abuse on psychopathology and problems in social relationships were found through response-focused difficulties in emotion regulation, whereas a significant indirect effect of childhood emotional neglect on problems in social relationships was found through antecedent-focused difficulties in emotion regulation. These results are consistent with theoretical models and empirical evidence suggesting differential effects of childhood emotional abuse and emotional neglect, and provide an important indication for developing targeted interventions focusing on specific higher order emotion dysregulation skill clusters.

We examined genetic and environmental contributions to the development of symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in preschool children. ADHD symptoms in siblings at 1.5, 3, and 5 years of age were investigated in a population-based sample from the prospective Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. The longitudinal contributions of additive genetic, shared, twin-specific, and unique environmental influences were estimated using biometric structural equation models. Heritability of ADHD symptoms ranged from 54% to 70%. There was evidence of partially new genetic influences at successive ages, with genetic correlations ranging from .58 to .89. Contributions from shared environmental factors and twin-specific factors were minor. The importance of unique environmental effects appeared to increase across ages, and was mostly specific to a given age. There was no evidence suggesting that this pattern differs across males and females. Symptoms of ADHD are highly heritability in young children from as early as 1.5 years of age. Longitudinal stability of ADHD symptoms is mainly attributable to genetic influences, but there is also some evidence for age-specific genetic influences. These findings contribute to our understanding of development of ADHD early in life, and can guide future molecular genetics studies.

The current longitudinal study examined whether attachment states of mind and childhood maltreatment predict sensitive caregiving during infancy, early childhood, and middle childhood among a sample of 178 parents who were involved with Child Protective Services. Nearly all the parents had themselves experienced childhood maltreatment based on their reports on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire—Short Form (Bernstein et al., 2003) when their children were infants. Adult Attachment Interviews (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985) were administered to parents when their children were infants (M = 10.92 months, SD = 8.66). Parental sensitivity was rated based on observations of parent–child interactions at three time points: infancy, early childhood, and middle childhood. During infancy, dismissing states of mind of parents predicted marginally lower sensitivity scores than autonomous states of mind. In early and middle childhood, dismissing states of mind of parents predicted significantly lower sensitivity ratings than autonomous states of mind. Unresolved states of mind of parents predicted significantly lower sensitivity scores than autonomous states of mind only during early childhood. Childhood maltreatment was not significantly associated with parents’ sensitivity ratings at all three time points. Findings suggest that among parents with Child Protective Services involvement, most of whom had themselves experienced maltreatment, parents’ unresolved states of mind predict insensitive caregiving in early childhood, and parents’ dismissing states of mind predict insensitive caregiving from infancy through middle childhood.