Prior theory and research have linked negative appraisals (NA), emotion reactivity (ER), and cognitive reactivity (CR) to depression; however, few studies have examined whether even two of these constructs simultaneously, but none have done so in child or adolescent populations. A total of 571 youths (ages 9–13) completed a novel procedure in which all three constructs were assessed in response to the same personally relevant, hypothetical, peer victimization events. Multilevel modeling enabled the extraction of dynamic, within-person, latent-variable measures of NA, ER, and CR. All three constructs were related to children's depressive symptoms in ways that were commensurate with most (but not all) theoretical frameworks. Gender and age differences also emerged. Support for an NA-predicts-ER-predicts-CR model suggests ways that these constructs can be integrated into a more complete, transtheoretical understanding of the cognitive-emotional substrate of depression in children.

This study used a combination of microlevel observation data and longitudinal questionnaire data to study the relationship between differential reactivity and differential susceptibility, guided by three questions: (a) Does a subset of children exist that is both more likely to respond with increasingly negative emotions to increasingly negative emotions of mothers and with increasingly positive emotions to increasingly positive emotions of mothers (“emotional reactivity”)? (b) Is emotional reactivity associated with temperament markers and rearing environment? (c) Are children who show high emotional reactivity “for better and for worse” also more susceptible to parenting predicting child behavior across a year? A total of 144 Dutch children (45.3% girls) aged four to six participated. Latent profile analyses revealed a group of average reactive children (87%) and a group that was emotionally reactive “for better and for worse” (13%). Highly reactive children scored higher on surgency and received lower levels of negative parenting. Finally, associations of negative and positive parenting with externalizing and prosocial behavior were similar (and nonsignificant) for highly reactive children and average reactive children. The findings suggest that children who are emotionally reactive “for better and for worse” within parent-child interactions are not necessarily more susceptible to parenting on a developmental time scale.

Cognitive theory posits that core beliefs play an active role in developing and maintaining symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis. This study sought to comprehensively examine core beliefs, their dimensionality, and their relationships to depression, anxiety, and attenuated psychotic symptoms in two groups of community youth: a group at ultrahigh risk for psychosis (UHR; n = 73, M age = 18.7) and a matched healthy comparison group (HC; n = 73, M age = 18.1). UHR youth reported significantly more negative beliefs about self and others, and significantly less positive beliefs about self and others. HC youth rarely endorsed negative self-beliefs. Exploratory factor analyses found that HC negative self-beliefs did not cohere as a single factor. We hypothesized specific links between core beliefs and symptoms based on cognitive models of each disorder, and tested these links through regression analyses. The results in the HC group were consistent with the proposed models of depression and anxiety. The results in the UHR group were consistent with proposed models of depression and negative psychotic symptoms, somewhat consistent with a proposed model of positive psychotic symptoms, and not at all consistent with a proposed model of anxiety. These findings add to a growing developmental literature on core beliefs and psychopathology, with important clinical implications.

Smoking is a major cause of worldwide morbidity and mortality. Almost no evidence-based intervention programs are available to help youth quit smoking. We argue that ineffective targeting of peer influence and engagement difficulties are significant barriers to successful youth smoking cessation. To address these barriers, we developed the mobile game intervention HitnRun. A two-armed randomized controlled trial (RCT; n = 144) was conducted and young smokers (Mage = 19.39; SDage = 2.52) were randomly assigned to either play HitnRun or read a psychoeducational brochure. Prior to, directly following the intervention period, and after three-month follow-up, weekly smoking behavior, abstinence rates, intervention dose, and peer- and engagement-related factors were assessed. Results indicated similar reductions in weekly smoking levels and similar abstinence rates for both groups. Yet, we found a dose effect with HitnRun only: The longer participants played HitnRun, the lower their weekly smoking levels were. In the brochure group, a higher dose was related to higher weekly smoking levels at all measurement moments. Exploratory analyses showed the most powerful effects of HitnRun for participants who connected with and were engaged by the intervention. Future work should build on the promising potential of HitnRun by increasing personalization efforts and strengthening peer influence components.

Exposure to threat increases the risk for internalizing problems in adolescence. Deficits in integrating bodily cues into representations of emotion are thought to contribute to internalizing problems. Given the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in regulating bodily responses and integrating them into representations of emotional states, coordination between activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and autonomic nervous system responses may be influenced by past threat exposure with consequences for the emergence of internalizing problems. A sample of 179 Mexican-origin adolescents (88 female) reported on neighborhood and school crime, peer victimization, and discrimination when they were 10–16 years old. At age 17, participants underwent a functional neuroimaging scan during which they viewed pictures of emotional faces while respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and skin conductance responses were measured. Adolescents also reported symptoms of internalizing problems. Greater exposure to threats across adolescence was associated with more internalizing problems. Threat exposure was also associated with stronger negative coupling between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and RSA. Stronger negative ventromedial prefrontal cortex–RSA coupling was associated with fewer internalizing problems. These results suggest the degree of coordinated activity between the brain and parasympathetic nervous system is both enhanced by threat experiences and decreased in adolescents with more internalizing problems.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe and complex disorder characterized by instability across many life domains, including interpersonal relations, behavior, and emotions. A core feature and contributor to BPD, emotion dysegulation (ED), consists of deficits in the ability to regulate emotions in a manner that allows the individual to pursue important goals or behave effectively in various contexts. Biosocial developmental models of BPD have emphasized a transaction of environmental conditions (e.g., invalidating environments and adverse childhood experiences) with key genetically linked vulnerabilities (e.g., impulsivity and emotional vulnerability) in the development of ED and BPD. Emerging evidence has begun to highlight the complex, heterotypic pathways to the development of BPD, with key heritable vulnerability factors possibly interacting with aspects of the rearing environment to produce worsening ED and an adolescent trajectory consisting of self-damaging behaviors and eventual BPD. Adults with BPD have shown evidence of a variety of cognitive, physiological, and behavioral characteristics of ED. As the precursors to the development of ED and BPD have become clearer, prevention and treatment efforts hold great promise for reducing the long-term suffering, functional impairment, and considerable societal costs associated with BPD.

This study examined changes in adolescents’ perceived relationship quality with mothers and fathers from middle school to high school, gender differences, and associated mental health consequences using longitudinal data from the New England Study of Suburban Youth cohort (n = 262, 48% female) with annual assessments (Grades 6–12). For both parents, alienation increased, and trust and communication decreased from middle school to high school, with greater changes among girls. Overall, closeness to mothers was higher than with fathers. Girls, compared to boys, perceived more trust and communication and similar levels of alienation with mothers at Grade 6. Girls perceived stronger increases in alienation from both parents and stronger declines in trust with mothers during middle school. Increasing alienation from both parents and less trust with mothers at Grade 6 was associated with higher levels of anxiety at Grade 12. Less trust with both parents at Grade 6 and increasing alienation and decreasing trust with mothers in high school were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms at Grade 12. Overall, girls reported having higher levels of anxiety at Grade 12 compared to boys. Findings on the course of the quality of parent–adolescent relationships over time are discussed in terms of implications for more targeted research and interventions.

Overgeneral autobiographical memory, the tendency to report general memories when asked to report specific event recollections, has been implicated in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. The dominant model of overgeneral memory, the CaR-FA-X model (Williams et al., 2007), proposes that three cognitive processes (increased rumination and avoidance, and reduced executive control) either independently, or in interaction, interfere with successful memory retrieval. Although psychopathology increases significantly during adolescence, no research has tested this model in its entirety, including interaction effects, longitudinally in community youth. We tested the model with 323 adolescents (152 females, 171 males) across four annual assessment points. Increased avoidance predicted higher proportions of overgeneral memories from Time 3 to Time 4, but this association was stronger for youth with elevated depressive symptoms across the four waves, and limited to memories generated in response to negative cue words. This finding may indicate that youth with stable higher levels of depression remember in an overgeneral way to avoid re-elicitation of negative event-related emotions. In youth with lower depression levels across time, the CaR-FA-X mechanisms did not predict overgeneral memory.

Children of alcoholics (COAs) are at risk for elevated internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Yet, little is known about the familial and behavioral adjustments of COAs following parental separation. Using an ecological–transactional framework, we examined how multiple risk factors contributed to the formation of different alcoholic family structures and how living in heterogeneous family structures affected COAs’ behavioral problems. The Michigan Longitudinal Study, a multiwave study on initially intact alcoholic and control families with preschool-age children (n = 503), was used to evaluate outcomes of offspring, when families either remained intact or were separated when the child was aged 12–14. Alcoholic families who later transitioned into stepfamilies were characterized with higher paternal antisociality, marital aggression, and serious family crises than alcoholic families that remained intact. COAs in stepfamilies (but not in single-parent families) exhibited higher levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in preadolescence compared with those in alcoholic intact families, in part because of elevated behavioral risk at age 3. Structural equation modeling indicated that the aggregated risk of stepfamily residence directly related to COAs’ internalizing and indirectly related to COAs’ externalizing problems, partially mediated by family stressors. Findings suggest targeting COAs in separated families for early intervention.

Identifying Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) constructs in early childhood is essential for understanding etiological pathways of psychopathology. Our central goal was to identify early emotion knowledge and self-regulation difficulties across different RDoC domains and examine how they relate to typical versus atypical symptom trajectories between ages 3 and 10. Particularly, we assessed potential contributions of children's gender, executive control, delay of gratification, and regulation of frustration, emotion recognition, and emotion understanding at age 3 to co-occurring patterns of internalizing and externalizing across development. A total of 238 3-year-old boys and girls were assessed using behavioral tasks and parent reports and reassessed at ages 5 and 10 years. Results indicated that very few children developed “pure” internalizing or externalizing symptoms relative to various levels of co-occurring symptoms across development. Four classes of co-occurring internalizing and externalizing problems were identified: low, low-moderate, rising, and severe-decreasing trajectories. Three-year-old children with poor executive control but high emotion understanding were far more likely to show severe-decreasing than low/low-moderate class co-occurring internalizing and externalizing symptom patterns. Child gender and poor executive control differentiated children in rising versus low trajectories. Implications for early intervention targeting self-regulation of executive control are discussed.

One generation's experience of childhood maltreatment is associated with that of the next. However, whether this intergenerational transmission is specific to distinct forms of maltreatment and what factors may contribute to its continuity remains unclear. Borderline personality pathology is predicted by childhood maltreatment and characterized by features (e.g., dysregulated emotion, relationship instability, impulsivity, and inconsistent appraisals of others) that may contribute to its propagation. Among 364 older adults and 573 of their adult children (total n = 937), self-reported exposure to distinct forms of childhood maltreatment (i.e., emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect as assessed by the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire) showed homotypic and heterotypic associations across generations with little evidence that latent factors unique to specific forms of maltreatment show generational continuity. General nonspecific indices of childhood maltreatment showed evidence of intergenerational transmission after accounting for demographic factors and parent socioeconomic status (b = 0.126, p = 9.21 × 10−4). This continuity was partially mediated by parental borderline personality pathology (assessed longitudinally through a variety of measures and sources, indirect effect: b = 0.031, 95% confidence interval [0.003, 0.060]). The intergenerational continuity of childhood maltreatment may largely represent general risk for nonspecific maltreatment that may, in part, be propagated by borderline personality pathology and/or shared risk factors.

African American youths are overrepresented in the American juvenile justice system relative to Caucasians. Yet, research on antisocial behaviors (ASB) has focused on predominantly Caucasian populations. Furthermore, relatively little is known about how environmental factors, such as supportive parenting (e.g., how close adolescents feel to their parent) and school connectedness (e.g., how supported adolescents feel at school), affect trajectories of ASB in Caucasians versus African Americans. This study mapped developmental trajectories of ASB in Caucasians (n = 10,764) and African Americans (n = 4,091) separately, using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We then examined supportive parenting and school connectedness on the trajectories of ASB. Four trajectories of ASB were identified for both Caucasians and African Americans: negligible, adolescence-peaked, low-persistence, and high-persistence ASB, although prevalence rates differed by racial-ethnic status. Supportive parenting reduced the risk of membership into the adolescence-peaked trajectory for both Caucasians and African Americans. However, school connectedness was less protective for African Americans than for Caucasians because it only predicted a lower risk of adolescence-peaked membership for African Americans. Findings may reflect the complex social dynamics between race and schools in the development of ASB.

Developing the ability to regulate one's emotions in accordance with contextual demands (i.e., emotion regulation) is a central developmental task of early childhood. These processes are supported by the engagement of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), a physiological hub of a vast network tasked with dynamically integrating real-time experiential inputs with internal motivational and goal states. To date, much of what is known about the ANS and emotion regulation has been based on measures of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a cardiac indicator of parasympathetic activity. In the present study, we draw from dynamical systems models to introduce two nonlinear indices of cardiac complexity (fractality and sample entropy) as potential indicators of these broader ANS dynamics. Using data from a stratified sample of preschoolers living in high- (i.e., emergency homeless shelter) and low-risk contexts (N = 115), we show that, in conjunction with respiratory sinus arrhythmia, these nonlinear indices may help to clarify important differences in the behavioral manifestations of emotion regulation. In particular, our results suggest that cardiac complexity may be especially useful for discerning active, effortful emotion regulation from less effortful regulation and dysregulation.

Psychological symptoms that arise in early childhood can follow a multitude of patterns into adolescence, including homotypic continuity (i.e., similar symptoms over time) and heterotypic continuity (i.e., a shift in symptoms over time). However, we know very little about the factors that distinguish homotypic vs. heterotypic continuity of early internalizing and externalizing symptoms over development. In a separate line of research, diurnal cortisol has been shown to predict later internalizing and externalizing problems. In the current study, we tested whether diurnal cortisol patterns moderated the course of internalizing and externalizing symptoms from preschool to early adolescence. 554 children (54% male) and parents participated in a longitudinal study. Parents reported on their children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms at ages 3 and 12, and children collected diurnal saliva samples at age 9. Results showed that a steeper cortisol decline at age 9 combined with high internalizing or externalizing problems at age 3 predicted higher internalizing problems at age 12. A more blunted cortisol decline combined with early internalizing or externalizing problems predicted higher externalizing problems in early adolescence. These results illustrate the moderating role of stress system functioning in homotypic and heterotypic patterns of psychopathology from preschool to early adolescence.

Little is known about the effect of natural disasters on children's neural development. Additionally, despite evidence that stress and parenting may both influence the development of neural systems underlying reward and threat processing, few studies have brought together these areas of research. The current investigation examined the effect of parenting styles and hurricane-related stress on the development of neural reactivity to reward and threat in children. Approximately 8 months before and 9 months after Hurricane Sandy, 74 children experiencing high and low levels of hurricane-related stress completed tasks that elicited the reward positivity and error-related negativity, event-related potentials indexing sensitivity to reward and threat, respectively. At the post-Hurricane assessment, children completed a self-report questionnaire to measure promotion- and prevention-focused parenting styles. Among children exposed to high levels of hurricane-related stress, lower levels of promotion-focused, but not prevention-focused, parenting were associated with a reduced post-Sandy reward positivity. In addition, in children with high stress exposure, greater prevention-focused, but not promotion-focused, parenting was associated with a larger error-related negativity after Hurricane Sandy. These findings highlight the need to consider contextual variables such as parenting when examining how exposure to stress alters the development of neural reactivity to reward and threat in children.