Early childhood mental health consultation (ECMHC) has been promoted by the federal government as a promising model for reducing early childhood expulsions and suspensions and is now implemented by numerous states. Despite growing ECMHC proliferation, this study is only the second randomized controlled trial of ECMHC, extending the methodologies of the first to include assessment of effects on random peers. Classrooms were assigned randomly to treatment or waitlist-control condition (n = 51 classrooms, 57 preschool teachers, and 190 preschoolers). Evaluation measures were collected at both pretreatment and posttreatment, following approximately six consultation visits. Classroom and teacher outcomes were evaluated with ordinary least squares regressions, while hierarchical linear modeling was used to evaluate child-level outcomes, accounting for the nested study design. Treatment children (both the target children who prompted the referral for ECMHC and random peers) evidenced significant improvements in social and emotional skills. Promising trend findings were noted for child behavior problem reduction and teacher pedagogical approach and locus of control. No significant effects were found on likelihood of expulsion and classroom mental health climate. This is the first ECMHC to demonstrate effects on nontarget peers in a rigorous randomized controlled trial. Programmatic and methodologic limitations and implications are discussed.

Founded in the social process model, the aim of this study was to identify whether the associations of relational aggression with concurrent and subsequent relational victimization differed depending on early adolescents' personal vulnerabilities and gender. The vulnerabilities of interest were social-information processing variables that convey greater emotional sensitivity, including rejection sensitivity, fear of negative evaluation, and avoidance of intimacy. Participants were 358 early adolescents (176 boys, 178 girls) aged 9 to 13 years. Relational aggression and victimization were assessed via peer nominations, whereas the three indicators of emotional sensitivity were assessed via self-report. Overall, results revealed greater relational aggression at Time 1 to be associated with greater relational victimization at both Time 1 and Time 2. However, this finding was qualified by both emotional sensitivity and gender. When considered separately, girls who were relationally aggressive and emotionally sensitive were at increased risk of victimization at both assessment points. In contrast, no link was found between relational aggression and victimization for boys, although relational vulnerabilities did have unique associations with boys' relational victimization. These findings have implications for our understanding of relational aggression and victimization, as well as for the development of interventions aimed at reducing these problems.

A great deal of research has focused on acculturation and enculturation, which represent the processes of adapting to a new culture. Despite this growing literature, results have produced inconsistent findings that may be attributable to differences in terms of the instruments used to assess acculturation and enculturation. Utilizing a 3-year longitudinal data set (with 1-year lags between assessments), the present study explored the psychometric properties of the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire—Short Version (BIQ-S) and the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans II (ARSMA-II) and examined the overlap between changes in these measures as they relate to internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. The present sample consisted of 216 immigrant Latino youth (43% boys; mean age 13.6 years at baseline; SD = 1.44 years, range 10 to 17). Exploratory structural equation modeling identified factor structures for the BIQ-S and ARSMA-II that diverged from their hypothesized structure. Growth curve models also indicate divergence between the BIQ-S and ARSMA-II in terms of change in acculturation and enculturation processes. Finally, the present findings emphasized that measures of acculturation and enculturation are not equivalent in terms of their effects on internalizing and externalizing problems.

This study examined trajectories of aggression and rule breaking during the transition from childhood to adolescence (ages 9–15), and determined whether these trajectories were predicted by lower order personality facets, overreactive parenting, and their interaction. At three time points separated by 2-year intervals, mothers and fathers reported on their children's aggression and rule breaking (N = 290, M age = 8.8 years at Time 1). At Time 1, parents reported on their children's personality traits and their own overreactivity. Growth mixture modeling identified three aggression trajectories (low decreasing, high decreasing, and high increasing) and two rule-breaking trajectories (low and high). Lower optimism and compliance and higher energy predicted trajectories for both aggression and rule breaking, whereas higher expressiveness and irritability and lower orderliness and perseverance were unique risk factors for increasing aggression into adolescence. Lower concentration was a unique risk factor for increasing rule breaking. Parental overreactivity predicted higher trajectories of aggression but not rule breaking. Only two Trait × Overreactivity interactions were found. Our results indicate that personality facets could differentiate children at risk for different developmental trajectories of aggression and rule breaking.

Building on prior work using Tom Dishion's Family Check-Up, the current article examined intervention effects on dysregulated irritability in early childhood. Dysregulated irritability, defined as reactive and intense response to frustration, and prolonged angry mood, is an ideal marker of neurodevelopmental vulnerability to later psychopathology because it is a transdiagnostic indicator of decrements in self-regulation that are measurable in the first years of life that have lifelong implications for health and disease. This study is perhaps the first randomized trial to examine the direct effects of an evidence- and family-based intervention, the Family Check-Up (FCU), on irritability in early childhood and the effects of reductions in irritability on later risk of child internalizing and externalizing symptomatology. Data from the geographically and sociodemographically diverse multisite Early Steps randomized prevention trial were used. Path modeling revealed intervention effects on irritability at age 4, which predicted lower externalizing and internalizing symptoms at age 10.5. Results indicate that family-based programs initiated in early childhood can reduce early childhood irritability and later risk for psychopathology. This holds promise for earlier identification and prevention approaches that target transdiagnostic pathways. Implications for future basic and prevention research are discussed.

We followed 100 community families from toddler age to preadolescence. Each mother– and father–child dyad was observed at 25, 38, 52, 67, and 80 months (10 hr/child) to assess positive and power-assertive parenting. At age 10 (N = 82), we obtained parent- and child-reported outcome measures of children's acceptance of parental socialization: cooperation with parental monitoring, negative attitude toward substance use, internalization of adult values, and callous–unemotional tendencies. Children who carried a short serotonin transporter linked polymorphic region gene (5-HTTLPR) allele and were highly anger prone, based on anger observed in laboratory from 25 to 80 months, were classified as high in biobehavioral risk. The remaining children were classified as low in biobehavioral risk. Biobehavioral risk moderated links between parenting history and outcomes. For low-risk children, parenting measures were unrelated to outcomes. For children high in biobehavioral risk, variations in positive parenting predicted cooperation with monitoring and negative attitude toward substance use, and variations in power-assertive parenting predicted internalization of adult values and callous–unemotional tendencies. Suboptimal parenting combined with high biobehavioral risk resulted in the poorest outcomes. The effect for attitude toward substance use supported differential susceptibility: children high in biobehavioral risk who received optimal parenting had a more adaptive outcome than their low-risk peers. The remaining effects were consistent with diathesis–stress.

The efforts of many neuroscientists are directed toward understanding the appreciable plasticity of the brain and behavior. In recent years, epigenetics has become a core of this focus as a prime mechanistic candidate for behavioral modifications. Animal models have been instrumental in advancing our understanding of environmentally driven changes to the epigenome in the developing and adult brain. This review focuses mainly on such discoveries driven by adverse environments along with their associated behavioral outcomes. While much of the evidence discussed focuses on epigenetics within the central nervous system, several peripheral studies in humans who have experienced significant adversity are also highlighted. As we continue to unravel the link between epigenetics and phenotype, discerning the complexity and specificity of epigenetic changes induced by environments is an important step toward understanding optimal development and how to prevent or ameliorate behavioral deficits bred by disruptive environments.

Self-inflicted injury (SII) is a continuum of intentionally self-destructive behaviors, including nonsuicidal self-injuries, suicide attempts, and death by suicide. These behaviors are among the most pressing yet perplexing clinical problems, affecting males and females of every race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, and nearly every age. The complexity of these behaviors has spurred an immense literature documenting risk and vulnerability factors ranging from individual to societal levels of analysis. However, there have been relatively few attempts to articulate a life span developmental model that integrates ontogenenic processes across these diverse systems. The objective of this review is to outline such a model with a focus on how observed patterns of comorbidity and continuity can inform developmental theories, early prevention efforts, and intervention across traditional diagnostic boundaries. Specifically, when SII is viewed through the developmental psychopathology lens, it becomes apparent that early temperamental risk factors are associated with risk for SII and a range of highly comorbid conditions, such as borderline and antisocial personality disorders. Prevention efforts focused on early-emerging biological and temperamental contributors to psychopathology have great potential to reduce risk for many presumably distinct clinical problems. Such work requires identification of early biological vulnerabilities, behaviorally conditioned social mechanisms, as well as societal inequities that contribute to self-injury and underlie intergenerational transmission of risk.

The present study examined the development of a cohort of 279 early adolescents (52% female) from 1990 to 2005. Guided by the interactionist model of socioeconomic status and human development, we proposed that parent aggressive personality, economic circumstances, interparental conflict, and parenting characteristics would affect the development of adolescent aggressive personality traits. In turn, we hypothesized that adolescent aggressiveness would have a negative influence on adolescent functioning as an adult in terms of economic success, personality development, and close relationships 11 years later. Findings were generally supportive of the interactionist model proposition that social and economic difficulties in the family of origin intensify risk for adolescent aggressive personality (the social causation hypothesis) and that this personality trait impairs successful transition to adult roles (the social selection hypothesis) in a transactional process over time and generations. These results underscore how early development leads to child influences that appear to directly hamper the successful transition to adult roles (statistical main effects) and also amplify the negative impact of dysfunctional family systems on the transition to adulthood (statistical interaction effects). The findings suggest several possible points of intervention that might help to disrupt this negative developmental sequence of events.

Children's healthy mental development has never been the focus of long-term, committed public health policy in the way that early physical health and development have been. We discuss four types of societal response to illness—cure, care, control, and prevention—and trace the history of public health in terms of its special responsibility to control and prevent disease. We identify four periods in the history of public health: the Sanitarian era (up to 1850), the Bacterial era (1850–1950), the Behavioral era (1950–present), and the Communitarian era (the next century). Looking at this history from the viewpoint of the developmental psychopathology of the first 2 decades of life, we trace progress in public health responses to children with mental illness, from a philosophy of control by isolation toward one of preventive intervention. We examine primary, or universal, prevention strategies that have been tried, and we suggest some that might be worth reconsidering.

Attachment classifications were obtained from the Strange Situation at 15 months and at 4 years for a sample of 82 low socioeconomic status rural Appalachian children. The rate of secure attachment in infancy was 50.5%, and the majority of insecure infants were disorganized. At 4 years of age 61.2% of children were secure; early secure relationships were likely to be maintained, and about half of the insecure infants changed to a secure classification by 4 years. Overall, there was low but significant stability in attachment at the level of secure/insecure. Comparisons of (a) children who changed from insecure to secure with those who were stable insecure and (b) stable secure children with those who changed from secure to insecure identified contextual, child, and maternal interaction factors associated with attaining secure attachment. Assessments of cognitive and socioemotional competence at 4 years and kindergarten age suggested a protective effect of secure infant attachment but little benefit from secure preschool attachment.This study was supported by Grants MCJ-540615 and R40 MC 00091 from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (Title V, Social Security Act), Health Resources and Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services and by Grant MH48395 from the National Institute of Mental Health, Department of Health and Human Services. Thanks to the families who participated and the Lincoln Primary Care Center Board of Directors and staff.

The present study examines the interaction between a polygenic score and an elementary school-based universal preventive intervention trial. The polygenic score reflects the contribution of multiple genes and has been shown in prior research to be predictive of smoking cessation and tobacco use (Uhl et al., 2014). Using data from a longitudinal preventive intervention study, we examined age of first tobacco use from sixth grade to age 18. Genetic data were collected during emerging adulthood and were genotyped using the Affymetrix 6.0 microarray. The polygenic score was computed using these data. Discrete-time survival analysis was employed to test for intervention main and interaction effects with the polygenic score. We found a main effect of the intervention, with the intervention participants reporting their first cigarette smoked at an age significantly later than controls. We also found an Intervention × Polygenic Score interaction, with participants at the higher end of the polygenic score benefitting the most from the intervention in terms of delayed age of first use. These results are consistent with Belsky and colleagues' (e.g., Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007; Belsky & Pleuss, 2009, 2013; Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2011) differential susceptibility hypothesis and the concept of “for better or worse,” wherein the expression of genetic variants are optimally realized in the context of an enriched environment, such as provided by a preventive intervention.

Using a developmental cascades framework, the current study investigated whether treating maternal depression via interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) may lead to more widespread positive adaptation for offspring and mothers including benefits to toddler attachment and temperament, and maternal parenting self-efficacy. The participants (N = 125 mother–child dyads; mean mother age at baseline = 25.43 years; 54.4% of mothers were African American; mean offspring age at baseline = 13.23 months) were from a randomized controlled trial of IPT for a sample of racially and ethnically diverse, socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers of infants. Mothers were randomized to IPT (n = 97) or an enhanced community standard control group (n = 28). The results of complier average causal effect modeling showed that engagement with IPT led to significant decreases in maternal depressive symptoms at posttreatment. Moreover, reductions in maternal depression posttreatment were associated with less toddler disorganized attachment characteristics, more adaptive maternal perceptions of toddler temperament, and improved maternal parenting efficacy 8 months following the completion of treatment. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature documenting the potential benefits to children of successfully treating maternal depression. Alleviating maternal depression appears to initiate a cascade of positive adaptation among both mothers and offspring, which may alter the well-documented risk trajectory for offspring of depressed mothers.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether children with a history of disorganized attachment in infancy were more likely than children without a history of disorganized attachment to exhibit symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at school age following trauma exposure. The sample consisted of 78 8.5-year-old children from a larger, ongoing prospective study evaluating the effects of intrauterine cocaine exposure (IUCE) on children's growth and development from birth to adolescence. At the 12-month visit, children's attachment status was scored from videotapes of infant–caregiver dyads in Ainsworth's strange situation. At the 8.5-year visit, children were administered the Violence Exposure Scale—Revised, a child-report trauma exposure inventory, and the Diagnostic Interview for Children and Adolescents by an experienced clinical psychologist masked to children's attachment status and IUCE status. Sixteen of the 78 children (21%) were classified as insecure–disorganized/insecure–other at 12 months. Poisson regressions covarying IUCE, gender, and continuity of maternal care indicated that disorganized attachment status at 12 months, compared with nondisorganized attachment status, significantly predicted both higher avoidance cluster PTSD symptoms and higher reexperiencing cluster PTSD symptoms. These findings suggest that the quality of early dyadic relationships may be linked to differences in children's later development of posttraumatic stress symptoms following a traumatic event.

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.

In a change from the once-dominant view of children as passive in the parent-led process of socialization, children are now seen as active agents who can considerably influence that process. However, these newer perspectives typically focus on the child's antagonistic influence, due either to a difficult temperament or aversive, resistant, negative behaviors that elicit adversarial responses from the parent and lead to future coercive cascades in the relationship. Children's capacity to act as receptive, willing, even enthusiastic, active socialization agents is largely overlooked. Informed by attachment theory and other relational perspectives, we depict children as able to adopt an active willing stance and to exert robust positive influence in the mutually cooperative socialization enterprise. A longitudinal study of 100 community families (mothers, fathers, and children) demonstrates that willing stance (a) is a latent construct, observable in diverse parent–child contexts, parallel at 38, 52, and 67 months and longitudinally stable; (b) originates within an early secure parent–child relationship at 25 months; and (c) promotes a positive future cascade toward adaptive outcomes at age 10. The outcomes include the parent's observed and child-reported positive, responsive behavior, as well as child-reported internal obligation to obey the parent and parent-reported low level of child behavior problems. The construct of willing stance has implications for basic research in typical socialization and in developmental psychopathology as well as for prevention and intervention.

Extant research consistently links youth externalizing problems and later maladaptive outcomes, and these behaviors are particularly detrimental given their relative stability across development. Although an array of risk and protective factors for externalizing problems have been identified, few studies have examined factors reflecting the multiple social–ecological levels that influence child development and used them to predict longitudinal trajectories of externalizing problems. The current study examined externalizing behavior trajectories in a sample of 1,094 at-risk youth (539 boys, 555 girls) from the Longitudinal Studies in Child Abuse and Neglect multisite longitudinal study of child maltreatment. Normed Child Behavior Checklist externalizing scores were used to estimate group trajectories via growth-based trajectory modeling at ages 10, 12, 14, and 16 using the SAS PROC TRAJ procedure. Model fit was assessed using the Bayes information criterion and the Akaike information criterion statistics. Analyses revealed optimal fit for five distinct behavioral trajectories: low stable, mid-increasing, mid-decreasing, medium high, and high stable. Multinomial logistic regressions revealed that a combination of risk and protective factors at individual, family, school, and neighborhood levels contribute to distinct trajectories of externalizing problems over time. Predictors of low and decreasing trajectories can inform interventions aimed at addressing externalizing problems among high-risk adolescents.

Drawing on five waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; mean age of wave 1 [Mage_W1] = 12.89, standard deviation [SD] = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.95, SD = .77; 199 European American and 193 Mexican American families; 217 intact and 175 stepfather families), this study documented transactional relations of mothers’ and fathers’ depressive symptoms with youth's symptomatology from early adolescence to young adulthood. Trait and time-varying cross-lagged models revealed that both mothers’ and fathers’ between- and within-person differences in depressive symptoms were associated with youth's internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Whereas each parent's depressive symptoms uniquely contributed to youth's internalizing symptoms, however, only mothers’ depressive symptoms influenced youth's externalizing symptoms. Although reciprocal effects of youth's internalizing symptoms on parents’ depressive symptoms were not significant, youth's externalizing symptoms predicted changes in mothers’ depressive symptoms over time. Moderation analyses revealed distinct transactional patterns by family ethnicity and child gender, but not by family structure. This study revealed dynamic transactions among family members’ symptomatology that point to opportune times and targets for intervention efforts aimed at mitigating the negative impact of parents’ depressive symptoms on youth's adjustment.

Anxiety disorders are associated with abnormalities in amygdala function and prefrontal cortex–amygdala connectivity. The majority of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have examined mean group differences in amygdala activation or connectivity in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders relative to controls, but emerging evidence suggests that abnormalities in amygdala function are dependent on the timing of the task and may vary across the course of a scanning session. The goal of the present study was to extend our knowledge of the dynamics of amygdala dysfunction by examining whether changes in amygdala activation and connectivity over scanning differ in pediatric anxiety disorder patients relative to typically developing controls during an emotion processing task. Examining changes in activation over time allows for a comparison of how brain function differs during initial exposure to novel stimuli versus more prolonged exposure. Participants included 34 anxiety disorder patients and 19 controls 7 to 19 years old. Participants performed an emotional face-matching task during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, and the task was divided into thirds in order to examine change in activation over time. Results demonstrated that patients exhibited an abnormal pattern of amygdala activation characterized by an initially heightened amygdala response relative to controls at the beginning of scanning, followed by significant decreases in activation over time. In addition, controls evidenced greater context-modulated prefrontal cortex–amygdala connectivity during the beginning of scanning relative to patients. These results indicate that differences in emotion processing between the groups vary from initial exposure to novel stimuli relative to more prolonged exposure. Implications are discussed regarding how this pattern of neural activation may relate to altered early-occurring or anticipatory emotion-regulation strategies and maladaptive later-occurring strategies in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders.