Maternal depression, parenting, and child psychological outcomes in the context of maternal pain.

Parental chronic pain is associated with adverse outcomes in children, but the mechanisms of transmission are largely untested. Mothers with chronic pain (N = 400, Mage = 40.3 years, 90.5% White) and their children (Mage = 10.33 years, 83.3% White, 50.2% female) were recruited in 2016-2018 to test longitudinal pathways of risk transmission from maternal chronic pain to children's psychological symptoms, examining roles of parenting, maternal depression, and child distress tolerance. Maternal pain was associated with positive (ß = .28) and pain-specific (ß = .10) parenting behaviors. Maternal depression was associated with lower child distress tolerance (ß = -.03), which was associated with greater child psychological symptoms (ß = -.62). Parenting and maternal pain were not prospectively associated with child outcomes. When considering the dual-generational impacts of chronic pain, physical and psychological functioning should be examined.

Caregiver report of social-emotional functioning in infants and young children after inflicted traumatic brain injury.

Social-emotional difficulties are common sequelae of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Children who have experienced inflicted TBI (iTBI) may be at increased risk for social-emotional problems due to the risk factors associated with both early neurologic injury and with child maltreatment. We characterized the associations among injury severity, caregiver type (i.e., biological parents, non-kinship, kinship), and child social-emotional functioning in 41 infants and young children who had sustained iTBI and were seen in a large, regional children's hospital. This study was a retrospective analysis, utilizing data collected from the medical record as part of routine clinical care. Social-emotional functioning was assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-Third Edition. Children with more severe injuries were rated as having worse social-emotional functioning. Caregiver type was associated with child social-emotional scores, above and beyond injury and demographic predictors. Biological parents were more likely to report better social-emotional skills than non-kinship caregivers, with the pattern of results suggesting that rater bias plays a role in this difference. In order to ensure that children are accurately identified for supports, these relationships should be considered when interpreting caregiver report of social-emotional skills.

Supportive Emotion Socialization Mitigates Risk Between Maternal Emotion Regulation Difficulties and Preschooler Emotion Regulation.

Few studies have examined protective maternal factors that may mitigate the intergenerational transmission of risk of maternal emotion regulation difficulties on child outcomes. The current study tested whether supportive maternal emotion socialization moderated the association between maternal emotion regulation difficulties and child emotion regulation behaviors. Participants were 68 mother-preschooler (aged 36-60 months) dyads that were oversampled for maternal symptoms of borderline personality disorder, in order to achieve greater variability in the range of maternal emotion regulation difficulties. Maternal emotion regulation difficulties and supportive emotion socialization behaviors were measured using self-report questionnaires, and child emotion regulation was coded during a frustration-eliciting blocked goal task. Results partially supported study hypotheses, such that trait maternal emotion regulation difficulties were associated with child displays of sadness at low levels of supportive maternal emotion socialization, but not when mothers engaged in higher levels of supportive emotion socialization. These findings suggest that maternal emotion regulation and emotion socialization are distinctly related to child emotion expression and regulatory actions, and that adaptive maternal emotion socialization may mitigate some of the adverse transgenerational impacts of impaired emotion regulation.

Direct and indirect associations among mothers' invalidating childhood environment, emotion regulation difficulties, and parental apology.

BACKGROUND: Effective emotion regulation abilities are essential for engaging in positive, validating parenting practices. Yet, many parents report difficulties with both emotion regulation and positive parenting, and these difficulties may in part be the result of parents' own childhood experiences of invalidation. Building upon prior literature documenting the intergenerational transmission of invalidation and emotion dysregulation, the present study examined the associations between these constructs and a specific parenting practice - parental apology - that can be conceptualized as a type of validating parenting practice. METHODS: Using a sample of 186 community mothers, we tested direct and indirect relationships via correlational and path analysis between participants' retrospective reports of parental invalidation during childhood, difficulties with emotion regulation, and two aspects of parental apology - proclivity (i.e., participants' self-reported propensity to apologize to their child) and effectiveness (i.e., participants' inclusion of specific apology content when prompted to write a child-directed apology). Parental invalidation, difficulties with emotion regulation, and parental apology proclivity were measured via self-report questionnaires. Apology effectiveness was measured by coding written responses to a hypothetical vignette. RESULTS: There was a significant negative bivariate relationship between difficulties with emotion regulation and parental apology proclivity and effectiveness. Parents' own childhood experiences of invalidation were linked to parental apology indirectly via emotion regulation difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that mothers with greater difficulties regulating emotions may be less able to or have a lower proclivity to apologize to their child when appropriate. Thus, parent apology may be an important addition to current calls for parent validation training.

Chronic stress primes innate immune responses in mice and humans.

Psychological stress (PS) is associated with systemic inflammation and accelerates inflammatory disease progression (e.g., atherosclerosis). The mechanisms underlying stress-mediated inflammation and future health risk are poorly understood. Monocytes are key in sustaining systemic inflammation, and recent studies demonstrate that they maintain the memory of inflammatory insults, leading to a heightened inflammatory response upon rechallenge. We show that PS induces remodeling of the chromatin landscape and transcriptomic reprogramming of monocytes, skewing them to a primed hyperinflammatory phenotype. Monocytes from stressed mice and humans exhibit a characteristic inflammatory transcriptomic signature and are hyperresponsive upon stimulation with Toll-like receptor ligands. RNA and ATAC sequencing reveal that monocytes from stressed mice and humans exhibit activation of metabolic pathways (mTOR and PI3K) and reduced chromatin accessibility at mitochondrial respiration-associated loci. Collectively, our findings suggest that PS primes the reprogramming of myeloid cells to a hyperresponsive inflammatory state, which may explain how PS confers inflammatory disease risk.

Applying new RDoC dimensions to the development of emotion regulation: Examining the influence of maternal emotion regulation on within-individual change in child emotion regulation.

While the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) acknowledges that environmental and developmental influences represent important elements of the RDoC framework, there is little specificity regarding how and when to systematically examine the impact of these dimensions on domains of function. The primary aims of this paper are to demonstrate the ways in which the RDoC can be expanded to include an explicit emphasis on 1) examining within-individual change in developmental processes over time and 2) evaluating the extent to which selective and measurable environmental influences drive meaningful change during key developmental periods. We provide data from an ongoing randomized control trial as a proof of concept to highlight how repeated assessments within an experimental intervention design affords the unique opportunity to test the impact of environmental influences on within-individual change. Using preliminary data from 77 mother-child dyads repeatedly assessed across 12 months during the preschool period, we demonstrate the influence of changes in maternal emotion regulation (ER) on within-individual growth in child ER and link that growth to fewer teacher-reported externalizing problems. In line with this Special Issue, findings are discussed within the context of expanding and clarifying the existing RDoC framework to explicitly incorporate environmental and developmental dimensions.

Psychosis in Parkinson's disease without dementia: common and comorbid with other non-motor symptoms.

Psychosis in Parkinson's disease (PD) is common and associated with a range of negative outcomes. Dementia and psychosis are highly correlated in PD, but the frequency and correlates of psychosis in patients without cognitive impairment are not well understood. One hundred and ninety-one non-demented PD patients at two movement disorders centers participated in a study of neuropsychiatric complications in PD and completed a detailed neurological and neuropsychiatric assessment, including the rater-administered Parkinson Psychosis Rating Scale for hallucinations, delusions, and minor symptoms of psychosis (illusions and misidentification of persons). Psychotic symptoms were present in 21.5% of the sample. Visual hallucinations were most common (13.6%), followed by auditory hallucinations (6.8%), illusions or misidentification of people (7.3%), and paranoid ideation (4.7%). Visual hallucinations and illusions or misidentification of people were the most common comorbid symptoms (3.1%). Depression (P = 0.01) and rapid eye movement behavior disorder symptoms (P = 0.03) were associated with psychosis in a multivariable model. The odds of experiencing psychotic symptoms were approximately five times higher in patients with comorbid disorders of depression and sleep-wakefulness. Even in patients without global cognitive impairment, psychosis in PD is common and most highly correlated with other non-motor symptoms. Screening for psychosis should occur at all stages of PD as part of a broad non-motor assessment. In addition, these findings suggest a common neural substrate for disturbances of perception, mood, sleep-wakefulness, and incipient cognitive decline in PD.