A longitudinal investigation of caregiving and adolescent post-traumatic stress symptoms during COVID-19: evidence for high resting RSA as a susceptibility factor.

BACKGROUND: Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were the most frequently reported mental health concern for youth during COVID-19, yet variations in youth's PTSS responses warrant empirical consideration. Features of the caregiving environment influence youth's responses to environmental stressors, and youth's parasympathetic nervous system regulation may qualify the magnitude and/or direction of these effects. This prospective investigation evaluated diathesis stress and differential susceptibility models of caregiving and parasympathetic influences on youth's PTSS responses to COVID-19. METHOD: Participants were 225 caregiver-youth dyads (youth 49.8% female at birth; 88.4% non-white) followed from childhood through adolescence and COVID-19. Youth's resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; Mage = 6.11, s.d. = 0.21), caregiving features (i.e. attachment security [youth Mage = 12.24, s.d. = 0.35] and caregiver internalizing psychopathology [caregiver Mage = 39.29, s.d. = 6.78]) were assessed pre-pandemic. Youth's PTSS was assessed one year prior to the US COVID-19 pandemic (Mage = 14.24, s.d. = 0.50) and during the spring of 2020 at the height of the pandemic (Mage = 15.23, s.d. = 0.57). RESULTS: Youth's PTSS increased during COVID-19. Youth with relatively high resting RSA evidenced the lowest PTSS when their caregiving environment featured high attachment security or low caregiver internalizing problems, but the highest PTSS when their caregiving environment featured low attachment security or high caregiver internalizing problems. In contrast, PTSS levels of youth with relatively low or average resting RSA did not differ significantly depending on attachment security or caregiver internalizing. CONCLUSIONS: Results are consistent with a differential susceptibility hypothesis, wherein relatively high resting RSA conferred heightened sensitivity to caregiving environments in a for-better-and-for-worse manner during COVID-19.

Early life adversity and adolescent sleep problems during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a reorganization of adolescents' routines, especially their sleep schedules. Utilising 175 caregiver-adolescent dyads, the current study examined associations of biological (e.g., prenatal substance use), environmental (e.g., poverty), and relational (e.g., child maltreatment) subtypes of early life adversity (ELA) with various components of adolescents' sleep across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational ELA explained unique variance in adolescents' sleep disturbances, but not other sleep components, following short- and longer-term exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the direction of this association switched such that relational ELA predicted decreased sleep disturbances during the initial phase of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 beyond pre-pandemic levels, but, over time, contributed to increased sleep disturbances beyond early-pandemic levels as the pandemic extended into the winter of 2020.

Parental warmth, adolescent emotion regulation, and adolescents' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: The United States (U.S.) Surgeon General Advisory has characterized the COVID-19 pandemic as a youth mental health crisis. Thus, elucidating factors affecting adolescents' mental health during the pandemic is important for supporting youth through current and future challenges. Parenting influences adolescents' ability to cope with stressors, and emotion regulation strategy use may underlie these effects. Methods: This longitudinal study of 206 adolescents (49% female; 46.6% Latine) from the U.S. evaluated pathways from perceived parental warmth and affection at age 12 to changes in adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems from before the pandemic (age 14) to the initial phase of the U.S COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 (age 15) through adolescents' pre-pandemic cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression emotion regulation strategy use at age 14. Results: Parental warmth and affection predicted decreased internalizing, but not externalizing, problems during the initial phase of the pandemic, and this effect was explained by adolescents' reduced reliance on expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy. Conclusion: These findings illuminate parenting and emotion regulation strategy selection as modifiable processes to support adolescents' mental health in this crisis and beyond.

Promoting Adolescents' Social Responsibility through Parent-Adolescent Conversations about the COVID-19 Pandemic.

PURPOSE: This longitudinal mixed-method study examined the content and qualities of parent-adolescent conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether discourse about social responsibility (i.e., care for others and health protective behaviors [HPBs]) within conversations predicted changes in adolescents' socially responsible behavior across the first year of the pandemic. METHODS: Participants were 122 ethnically/racially diverse parent-adolescent dyads from Southern California. In spring 2020 (Time 1), adolescents completed an online survey measuring their engagement in HPBs (e.g., social distancing) and prosociality (both pandemic-specific and global). A few months following survey completion (Time 2), parent-adolescent dyads engaged in an audio-recorded conversation about the pandemic. In winter 2020 (Time 3), adolescents' engagement in HPBs and prosociality were reassessed via an online survey. RESULTS: Dyads spent 25% of conversational turns, on average, discussing social responsibility (4% and 21% of turns discussing care for others and HPBs, respectively). Internal state language reflecting emotion terms was positively correlated with the proportion of conversational turns spent discussing care for others and negatively associated with conversational turns spent discussing HPBs. Regression analyses revealed that both care for others and HPB conversation themes uniquely predicted increases in adolescents' engagement in HPBs over time; however, care for others was a stronger predictor (ß = 0.24 vs. ß = 0.16). Discussions about care for others (but not HPBs) predicted increases in pandemic-specific prosociality, but not global prosocial behavior. DISCUSSION: Parent-adolescent conversations may be rich ground for the socialization of adolescents' social responsibility during crises and can inform best practices for engaging adolescents in current and future community health initiatives.

Autonomic nervous system reactivity to emotion and childhood trajectories of relational and physical aggression.

This study investigated the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) coordination in response to emotion in girls' and boys' development of relational (e.g., ignoring, excluding) and physical (e.g., hitting, kicking) aggression. Caregivers reported on children's relational and physical aggression at ages 6, 7, 8, and 10 years (N = 232, 50.4% girls, 46.6% Latinx). Sympathetic nervous system (assessed via pre-ejection period) and parasympathetic nervous system (assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia) reactivity were measured in response to video clips depicting fear, happiness, and sadness at age 7. Growth curve models indicated that ANS reactivity to sadness, but not to fear or happiness, was related to trajectories of relational aggression. In contrast, ANS reactivity to all three emotions was associated with trajectories of physical aggression. Effects differed across genders, indicating that distinct patterns of ANS reactivity to emotion may be involved in girls' and boys' development of aggression. Overall, these findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the role of ANS reactivity to emotion in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study considers ANS reactivity to specific emotions, as related to both relational and physical aggression, and as differentially expressed among girls versus boys.

Latina mothers' cultural orientation and child self-esteem: The mediating role of cultural socialization.

This longitudinal investigation evaluated parental cultural socialization practices as a central mechanism by which parents' cultural values influence developmental outcomes in ethnic-racial minority children. Drawing on a sample of 129 Latina mothers and their children (48.1% daughters and 51.9% sons), path analyses evaluated hypothesized individual and interactive contributions of mothers' Latina heritage and American mainstream cultural orientations to changes in children's self-esteem via overt and covert cultural socialization practices. Mothers reported on their cultural orientation and socialization practices when their children were ages 5 and 8, respectively. Children reported their self-esteem at ages 8 and 10. Controlling for family socioeconomic status, mothers' nativity status, and prior child self-esteem, path analyses revealed a significant indirect effect from mothers' heritage orientation to increased child self-esteem via overt cultural socialization practices. Interestingly, a multigroup analysis by gender showed that mothers' heritage orientation was positively related to overt and covert cultural socialization practices toward both daughters and sons, but the indirect paths to child self-esteem through cultural socialization did not attain significance for daughters. Moreover, among sons, the indirect path through overt cultural socialization predicted increased self-esteem, whereas the indirect path through covert cultural socialization predicted decreased self-esteem. These findings show that cultural socialization is a salient process by which parental cultural orientation influences children's self-esteem while highlighting the specificity of these effects across overt and covert expressions of cultural socialization and child gender. Efforts to promote positive self-esteem among Latinx children should encourage parental cultural socialization practices, such as teaching, reading, and/or performing activities that celebrate the Latinx culture.

The development of empathy in child maltreatment contexts.

BACKGROUND: Despite robust associations between child maltreatment experiences and emotional development, a paucity of research examines the influence of child maltreatment on empathy development, and still fewer studies differentiate these effects across maltreatment subtypes. OBJECTIVE: The present study examined the development of children's empathy from ages six to eight, as predicted by maltreatment, and as moderated by children's attachment representations. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Participants were a community sample of 250 children followed longitudinally and assessed in a laboratory setting with their primary caregivers. METHOD: Child maltreatment experiences from birth to age six were assessed by semi-structured interviews with caregivers, which were rated according to widely-used child maltreatment coding protocols, and by caregiver and child self-report measures. Child empathy was assessed at ages six and eight by caregiver-report. Attachment representations were observed in children using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery. RESULTS: Child emotional abuse (ß = -0.150, p = .012) and child neglect (ß = -0.137, p = .016) predicted decreased empathy at age eight, whereas child physical abuse (ß = 0.132, p = .027) and child exposure to domestic violence (ß = 0.164, p = .004) predicted increased empathy at age eight. Further, children's negative representations of mother figures moderated the positive association between child physical abuse and empathy (ß = -0.177, p = .005), such that the association became weaker as negative representations increased. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the nuanced ways in which child maltreatment experiences of different subtypes contribute to the development of empathy in school-aged children.

The Development of Maternal Psychological Control in Early Adolescence: Maternal, Youth, and Neighborhood Antecedents.

Despite abundant research documenting negative associations between parental psychological control and youth adjustment, little is known about precursors of parental psychological control. The current study evaluated maternal, youth, and neighborhood predictors of changes in maternal psychological control across the transition to adolescence. Mother-youth dyads (N = 211, 50.2% female children; 46.4% Latinx, 17.5% Black, 11.4% white, and 24.7% multiracial) reported on maternal psychological control at youth ages 10 and 12. Controlling for youth ethnicity and race, family income-to-needs, and prior levels of maternal psychological control at age 10, structural equation models showed that maternal problems (i.e., anxiety, alcohol dependence, caregiving helplessness) predicted increases and youth externalizing problems (e.g., attention problems, rule-breaking) predicted decreases in maternal reports of psychological control. Neighborhood risks (i.e., poverty, crime, single-parent households) predicted increases in youth reports of maternal psychological control. Exploratory analyses by gender indicated that neighborhood risks predicted decreases in maternal reports of psychological control for girls, but increases in maternal reports of psychological control for boys. This study identified specific antecedents of maternal psychological control that can be targeted in future intervention efforts to reduce negative parenting to promote positive youth development.

Attachment security predicts adolescents' prosocial and health protective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prosocial and health protective behaviors are critical to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, yet adolescents have been difficult to engage. Attachment security promotes adolescents' capacities to navigate stress, and influences prosocial and health behaviors. Drawing on a diverse sample of 202 adolescents (48% female; 47.5% Latinx) this study evaluated relations among attachment, mental health, and prosocial and health protective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Attachment security (age 12) predicted adolescents' (age 15) COVID-19 prosocial (f2  = .201) and health protective behaviors (f2  = .274) during the pandemic via smaller-than-expected increases in mental health symptoms above pre-pandemic levels (age 14). Findings highlight the importance of attachment for supporting adolescents' mental health responses to life stressors and promoting prosocial and health protective behaviors.

Parent-Adolescent Conversations About COVID-19 Influence Adolescents' Empathic Concern and Adherence to Health Protective Behaviors.

PURPOSE: This longitudinal investigation assessed how the frequency of parent-adolescent conversations about COVID-19, moderated by adolescents' stress, influenced adolescents' empathic concern and adherence to health protective behaviors (HPBs) throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Participants were 181 adolescents (Mage = 15.23 years; 51% girls; 47% Latinx) and their parents. Frequency of parent-adolescent conversations about COVID-19 (i.e., pandemic-related symptoms, health behaviors, and social effects), empathic concern toward vulnerable others, and adolescent HPBs were assessed via surveys in the first months of the pandemic, and empathic concern and HPBs were assessed again nine months later. RESULTS: Results revealed that more frequent parent-adolescent conversations early in the pandemic predicted increased adherence to HPBs throughout the pandemic when adolescents reported low stress (direct effect), but conversation frequency predicted decreased adherence to HPBs via reduced empathic concern when adolescents reported high stress (indirect effect). CONCLUSIONS: Parents and other socialization agents, such as teachers, should be sensitive to adolescents' stress before engaging them in frequent conversations about the pandemic to mitigate the potential negative impact these conversations may have on adolescents' empathic concern and adherence to HPBs. Decreasing adolescents' stress may be an initial step in promoting effective message transference. Collective action (including wearing masks and receiving the vaccine) remains critical to overcoming COVID-19. The current study contributes to our understanding of the processes underlying adolescents' adherence to recommended HPBs, which is critical as pandemic fatigue and stress continue to rise.

The physical health costs of positive adaptation to childhood adversity.

Theories of allostatic load suggest that recurrent adaptive adjustments in contexts of adversity may have a negative impact on physical well-being. To test this hypothesis, this study evaluated 6-year-old children's ego-resilience and physical abuse experiences on behavior problems and physical illness at the age of 8 years. A significant interaction between ego-resilience and physical abuse exposure indicated that, although ego-resilience buffered physically abused children from internalizing problems, it also predicted more physical illness in that group. Findings contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that efforts to mobilize an adaptive response in contexts of adversity may exact a cost on physical well-being.

Confía en mí, Confío en ti: Applying developmental theory to mitigate sociocultural risk in Latinx families.

Ed Zigler was a champion for underprivileged youth, one who worked alongside communities to fight for long-lasting systemic changes that were informed by his lifespan and ecological perspective on the development of the whole child. This paper reports on the development, implementation, and preliminary outcomes of an intervention that embodied the Zigler approach by adopting a community participatory research lens to integrate complementary insights across community-based providers (promotoras), Latinx immigrant families, and developmental psychologists in the service of promoting parent-child relationship quality and preventing youth aggression and violence. Analyses from the first 112 Latinx mother-youth dyad participants (46% female children, ages 8-17) in the resultant, Confía en mí, Confío en ti, eight-week intervention revealed significant pre-post increases in purported mechanisms of change (i.e., attachment security, reflective functioning) and early intervention outcomes (i.e., depressive, anxiety, and externalizing problems). Treatment responses varied by youth age. A case analysis illustrated the lived experiences of the women and children served by this intervention. We discuss future directions for the program, as well as challenges to its sustainability. Finally, we consider Ed's legacy as we discuss the contributions of this work to developmental science and our understanding of attachment relationships among low-income immigrant Latinx families.

The Implications of Self-Definitions of Child Sexual Abuse for Understanding Socioemotional Adaptation in Young Adulthood.

This study examined associations between child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors' self-definition status (i.e., whether or not survivors self-identified as sexually abused) and multiple measures of psychopathology, self-system functioning, and risk behaviors. We evaluated the hypothesis that survivors with concordant abuse perceptions (i.e., individuals who reported objective CSA and self-defined as sexually abused) would evidence more pronounced adjustment difficulties in young adulthood than survivors with discordant perceptions (i.e., individuals who reported objective CSA but did not self-define as sexually abused). In this large and ethnically diverse college student sample (N = 2,195; 63.8% female, 36.2% male; 83.3% nonwhite), objective experiences of CSA were associated with increased psychopathology, decreased self-system functioning, and increased risk behaviors, but the magnitude of these effects varied by survivors' self-definition status. Relative to their nonmaltreated peers, survivors with concordant abuse perceptions evidenced the largest elevations in psychopathology and risk behaviors, whereas survivors with discordant abuse perceptions evidenced the largest deficits in self-system functioning. These findings indicate that standard screening criteria may misidentify a sizable group of CSA survivors because these individuals do not perceive their experiences as "abuse." Efforts to understand the meaning ascribed to CSA experiences may profitably guide clinical interventions to enhance specific domains of functioning.

A latent change score approach to understanding dynamic autonomic coordination.

Children's self-regulation is a core adaptive system in child development. Physiological indices of regulation, particularly the autonomic nervous system (ANS), have garnered increased attention as an informative level of analysis in regulation research. Cardiography supports the simultaneous examination of both ANS branches via measures of pre-ejection period (PEP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) as indicators of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity, respectively. However, despite their heavily intertwined functions, research examining autonomic coordination across sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is scarce. Moreover, extant efforts have favored static, mean level reactivity analyses, despite the dynamic nature of ANS regulation and the availability of analytic tools that can model these processes across time. This study drew on a sample of 198 six-year-old children from a diverse community sample (49.5% female, 43.9% Latinx) to examine dynamic autonomic coordination using bivariate latent change score modeling to evaluate bidirectional influences of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity over the course of a challenging puzzle completion task. Results indicated that children evidenced reciprocal sympathetic activation (i.e., PEP attenuation and RSA withdrawal) across the challenge task, and these regulatory responses were characterized by a temporally leading influence of PEP on lagging changes in RSA. The current findings contribute to our understanding of children's autonomic coordination while illustrating a novel analytic technique to advance ongoing efforts to understand the etiology and developmental significance of children's physiological self-regulation.

Statistical Approaches for Highly Skewed Data: Evaluating Relations between Maltreatment and Young Adults' Non-Suicidal Self-injury.

Objective: Clinical phenomena often feature skewed distributions with an overabundance of zeros. Unfortunately, empirical methods for dealing with this violation of distributional assumptions underlying regression are typically discussed in statistical journals with limited translation to applied researchers. Therefore, this investigation compared statistical approaches for addressing highly skewed data as applied to the evaluation of relations between child maltreatment and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). Method: College students (N = 2,651; 64.2% female; 85.2% nonwhite) completed the Child Abuse and Trauma Scale and the Functional Assessment of Self-Mutilation. Statistical models were applied to cross-sectional data to provide illustrative comparisons across predictions to a) raw, highly skewed NSSI outcomes, b) natural log, square-root, and inverse NSSI transformations to reduce skew, c) zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) and negative-binomial zero-inflated (NBZI) regression models to account for both disproportionate zeros and skewness in the NSSI data, and d) the skew-t distribution to model NSSI skewness. Results: Child maltreatment was significantly and positively related to NSSI frequency in the raw, transformation, and zero-inflated models, but this relation was negative in the skew-t model. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of using zero-inflated models rather than transformation approaches to address data skew. Moreover, whereas the skew-t distribution has been used to model skewed non-clinical data, this study suggests that the skew-t approach may not be well-suited to address skewed clinical data.

Children's secure base script knowledge as a mediator between early life stress and later behavior problems.

Attachment theory posits that children's interactions with caregivers contribute to internalized representations that reflects the common and recurring elements of sensitive caregiving interactions (i.e. the secure base script). These internalized representations are theorized to influence later adaptation, including the development of psychopathology. Given prior research suggesting that stress exposure may undermine secure base script knowledge (SBSK), this study evaluated SBSK development in early childhood as a mechanism by which childhood stress exposure may influence later adaptation. We hypothesized that children's (N = 230; Mage = 73.30 months, SD = 2.51, 50% girls; 45.7% Latinx) stress exposure would be associated with lower levels of SBSK at age 6, which, in turn, would contribute to increased internalizing and externalizing symptoms at age 8. SBSK emerged as a significant mechanism by which early life stress may contribute to later externalizing, but not internalizing, child behavior problems. These findings highlight the role of SBSK as a profitable focus for both risk identification and intervention efforts aimed at reducing behavioral maladaptation among stress-exposed children.

Children's physiological reactivity in emotion contexts and prosocial behavior.

INTRODUCTION: Building on prior evidence that prosocial behavior is related to the regulation of personal distress in difficult situations, and given that physiological regulation is a central contributor to effective emotion regulation, this investigation evaluated whether and how children's autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity during emotion challenges influenced later expressions of prosocial behavior. METHODS: The current study utilized a diverse sample of school-aged children (N = 169; 47.9% female; 47.3% Latinx) to evaluate relations between children's parasympathetic (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) and sympathetic (i.e., pre-ejection period; PEP) reactivity in response to each of three film-elicited emotion challenges (i.e., sadness, happiness, and fear) at age 7 and both observed and parent-reported prosocial behavior one year later. RESULTS: Children's parasympathetic reactivity to a film eliciting sadness evidenced a nonlinear relation with later prosocial sharing such that children who evidenced either RSA withdrawal or augmentation in response to the sad emotion challenge engaged in higher levels of prosocial behavior than children who evidenced relatively low or absent reactivity. Parasympathetic reactivity to films eliciting happiness or fear was not significantly related to later prosocial behavior. Likewise, children's sympathetic reactivity in response to the emotion challenges did not significantly predict later prosocial behavior. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide preliminary support for a nonlinear association between children's parasympathetic emotion reactivity and later prosocial behavior, and suggest that children's ANS regulation in sad emotion contexts may be particularly important for understanding prosocial development.

The unique effects of maternal and paternal depressive symptoms on youth's symptomatology: Moderation by family ethnicity, family structure, and child gender.

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.

Prospective associations between trauma, placement disruption, and ethnic-racial identity among newly emancipated foster youth.

INTRODUCTION: Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) is an important developmental process for ethnic-racial minority youth. However, little is known about how adverse life experiences may be related to ERI development. Thus, the current study evaluated prospective associations of emancipated foster youth's histories of childhood maltreatment and foster placement disruption with ERI centrality and ERI private regard, as well as the adaptive implications of ERI. METHOD: Participants were 144 emancipated foster youth (69.4% female) from ethnic-racial minority backgrounds (27.8% Black, 32.6% Latinx, 39.6% multiracial) who participated in a longitudinal study of youth's adaptation to aging out of the US child welfare system. Youth reported on their childhood maltreatment severity and child welfare placement history at wave 1 (Mage_w1 = 19.62, SD = 1.11), and on their ERI centrality, ERI private regard, and socioemotional adjustment (i.e., social support, self-esteem, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction) five years later (Mage_w2 = 24.15). RESULTS: Path analyses revealed that childhood maltreatment severity and placement disruption were associated with lower ERI private regard, but not ERI centrality. Moreover, private regard was associated with better socioemotional adjustment (i.e., higher levels of self-esteem and social support), whereas centrality was related to poorer adjustment (i.e., lower levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction, and higher rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms), and these relations varied by ethnicity-race. CONCLUSIONS: The current findings suggest that efforts to promote positive feelings toward one's ethnic-racial group membership can support ethnic-racial minority foster youth's capacity to negotiate developmental challenges in and beyond the child welfare system.

Data Harmonization: Establishing Measurement Invariance across Different Assessments of the Same Construct across Adolescence.

Longitudinal measurement invariance is a major concern for developmental scholars who seek to evaluate the same underlying construct across time. Unfortunately, discontinuities in the expression of various psychological constructs, as well as essential changes in measurement that are necessitated by shifting developmental capacities and practice effects over time, make the task of establishing longitudinal invariance extremely difficult. Drawing on 5 waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; Mage_W1 = 12.89, SD = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.95, SD = .77; 199 European American and 193 Mexican American families), the current investigation sought to establish measurement invariance across developmentally appropriate changes in measures of depressive symptomatology from early adolescence through early adulthood. Using a combination of item parceling and the common and unique items from 2 assessment instruments for depressive symptoms, the data supported strong factorial invariance in youth's depressive symptoms across 5 waves of measurement. Findings suggest that traditional invariance approaches can be adapted to determine whether the same construct underlies different measurement instruments across time. This analytic strategy can allow researchers and clinicians to use more sophisticated techniques to understand changes in symptomatology regardless of changes in measurement or developmental capacity. Applying this approach to model patterns of depressive symptomatology from early adolescence to early adulthood has important clinical implications for elucidating periods when youth experience elevations in depressive symptoms and heightened needs for intervention services.