Parent's anxiety links household stress and young children's behavioral dysregulation.

Young children rely heavily on their caregivers to gain information about the environment, especially during times of duress. Therefore, considering parental assessments of behavior in the context of stressful environments may better facilitate our understanding of the longstanding association between early environmental stressors and changes in child behavior and physiology. Confirming many previous reports, a higher degree of household stress exposure was associated with elevated mental health symptoms in 2- to 6-year-old children (N = 115; anxiety and externalizing behaviors), which were verified in a subset of children with laboratory-based behaviors (N = 46). However, these associations were mediated by parental anxiety symptoms, which were also associated with increased cortisol levels in children. A closer look at the stressors indicated that it was the adult-targeted, and not the child-targeted, stressors that correlated most with children's behavior problems. These results highlight the importance of considering the mediating effect of parents, when examining associations between household stress and young children's behavioral development.

Positive valence bias and parent-child relationship security moderate the association between early institutional caregiving and internalizing symptoms.

Institutional caregiving is associated with significant deviations from species-expected caregiving, altering the normative sequence of attachment formation and placing children at risk for long-term emotional difficulties. However, little is known about factors that can promote resilience following early institutional caregiving. In the current study, we investigated how adaptations in affective processing (i.e., positive valence bias) and family-level protective factors (i.e., secure parent-child relationships) moderate risk for internalizing symptoms in previously institutionalized (PI) youth. Children and adolescents with and without a history of institutional care performed a laboratory-based affective processing task and self-reported measures of parent-child relationship security. PI youth were more likely than comparison youth to show positive valence biases when interpreting ambiguous facial expressions. Both positive valence bias and parent-child relationship security moderated the association between institutional care and parent-reported internalizing symptoms, such that greater positive valence bias and more secure parent-child relationships predicted fewer symptoms in PI youth. However, when both factors were tested concurrently, parent-child relationship security more strongly moderated the link between PI status and internalizing symptoms. These findings suggest that both individual-level adaptations in affective processing and family-level factors of secure parent-child relationships may ameliorate risk for internalizing psychopathology following early institutional caregiving.

Telomere Erosion and Depressive Symptoms Across Development Following Institutional Care.

OBJECTIVE: A large literature has identified exposure to early caregiving adversities as a potent risk for developing affective psychopathology, with depression, in particular, increasing across childhood into adolescence. Evidence suggests telomere erosion, a marker of biological aging, may underlie associations between adverse early-life experiences and later depressive behavior; yet, little is understood about this association during development. METHOD: The current accelerated longitudinal study examined concurrent telomere length and depressive symptoms concurrently, 2 and 4 years later, from the preschool period through adolescence among children exposed (n =116) and not exposed (n = 242) to early previous institutional (PI) care. RESULTS: PI care was associated with shorter telomeres on average and with quadratic age-related growth in depressive symptoms, indicating a steeper association between PI care and depressive symptoms in younger age groups that leveled off in adolescence. Contrary to studies in adult samples, telomere length was not associated with depressive symptoms, and it did not predict future symptoms. CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that early caregiving disruptions increase the risk for both accelerated biological aging and depressive symptoms, although these variables did not correlate with each other during this age range.

Cultural differences in the links between parental control and children's emotional expressivity.

Research suggests that parental control may be motivated by various socialization goals and contributes to children's adjustment in diverse ways depending on cultural context. The present study examined whether parental psychological control was differentially related to children's emotional expressivity in a sample of 127 Korean, Asian American (AA), and European American (EA) preschoolers. Results indicated that Korean and AA parents endorsed more parental control (emotion suppression, shaming) than EA parents. Similarly, Korean and AA children displayed less observable sadness and exuberance during emotion-eliciting tasks than EA children. Furthermore, moderation analyses revealed that for EA families, parental control was positively correlated with child anger and exuberance; however, the associations were not significant for AA and Korean families.

Longitudinal changes in amygdala, hippocampus and cortisol development following early caregiving adversity.

Although decades of research have shown associations between early caregiving adversity, stress physiology and limbic brain volume (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus), the developmental trajectories of these phenotypes are not well characterized. In the current study, we used an accelerated longitudinal design to assess the development of stress physiology, amygdala, and hippocampal volume following early institutional care. Previously Institutionalized (PI; N = 93) and comparison (COMP; N = 161) youth (ages 4-20 years old) completed 1-3 waves of data collection, each spaced approximately 2 years apart, for diurnal cortisol (N = 239) and structural MRI (N = 156). We observed a developmental shift in morning cortisol in the PI group, with blunted levels in childhood and heightened levels in late adolescence. PI history was associated with reduced hippocampal volume and reduced growth rate of the amygdala, resulting in smaller volumes by adolescence. Amygdala and hippocampal volumes were also prospectively associated with future morning cortisol in both groups. These results indicate that adversity-related physiological and neural phenotypes are not stationary during development but instead exhibit dynamic and interdependent changes from early childhood to early adulthood.

Cultural differences in daily support experiences.

Previous research has suggested that Asian Americans (AAs) are less likely to mobilize social support, and find support to be less helpful, when compared with European Americans (EAs). In a 10-day daily diary study of AA and EA college students, we hypothesized that AAs would activate support less frequently than EAs for both stressful and positive events, a cultural difference that would be mediated by group harmony values. We also predicted that AAs would find support to be less helpful, and we explored differences in the sources of support used. Results confirmed that cultural differences in support use were partially mediated by the value of maintaining group harmony through emotional restraint. AAs also perceived received support to be less helpful and more frequently used discretionary rather than kinship support sources. Findings suggest that naturalistic support experiences differ markedly for these groups, with implications for help-seeking behavior and mental health services.

Learning what feelings to desire: socialization of ideal affect through children's storybooks.

Previous findings suggest that cultural factors influence ideal affect (i.e., the affective states that people ideally want to feel). Three studies tested the hypothesis that cultural differences in ideal affect emerge early in life and are acquired through exposure to storybooks. In Study 1, the authors established that consistent with previous findings, European American preschoolers preferred excited (vs. calm) states more (indexed by activity and smile preferences) and perceived excited (vs. calm) states as happier than Taiwanese Chinese preschoolers. In Study 2, it was observed that similar differences were reflected in the pictures (activities, expressions, and smiles) of best-selling storybooks in the United States and Taiwan. Study 3 found that across cultures, exposure to exciting (vs. calm) storybooks altered children's preferences for excited (vs. calm) activities and their perceptions of happiness. These findings suggest that cultural differences in ideal affect may be due partly to differential exposure to calm and exciting storybooks.