Exploring the Effects of Parental Involvement on Broad and Specific Dimensions of Behavioral Problems in Adolescence.

Few studies have differentiated the specificity from the generality of the associations between parental involvement and adolescent behavioral problems across levels of the psychopathology hierarchy. Among 537 adolescents aged 11-17 years, the current study considered the extent to which associations between mother- and father- involvement and behavioral problems (assessed via the parent-reported Child Behavior Checklist) were unique to a specific dimension or reflective of associations with higher-order factors. The hierarchical structure of behavioral problems fit well, with total problems at the top, internalizing and externalizing at the second level, and eight specific symptom dimensions at the third level. Mother and father involvement were protective factors for withdrawn/depressed symptoms and risk factors for anxious/depressed symptoms that were not accounted for by internalizing or total problems. Mother involvement was also a protective factor for rule-breaking behavior and a risk factor for social problems symptoms and aggressive behavior symptoms that were not accounted for by externalizing or total problems.

Structural brain correlates of eating pathology symptom dimensions: A systematic review.

There has been an increasing interest in neurobiological correlates of psychopathology with a growing consensus that such research questions are best investigated through dimensional approaches to psychopathology. One area that has been noticeably understudied in this regard is eating pathology. Therefore, the goal of the current systematic review was to summarize research on structural brain correlates of symptom dimensions of eating-related pathology. Google Scholar and PubMed databases were searched following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Results suggest that restrained eating is associated with increased GMV (gray matter volume) in regions involved in emotional, visuo-spatial, attentional, and self-related processing. Disinhibitory eating is associated with increased GMV in regions involved in reward value of food-related stimuli and decreased GMV in regions involved in emotional/motivational processing. All told, results suggest that dimensions of eating pathology have differential neuroanatomical correlates potentially suggesting differences in neural pathways which has the potential to support future biologically-driven classification and treatment efforts.

Effect of aging differs for memory of object identity and object position within a spatial context.

There has been considerable focus on investigating age-related memory changes in cognitively healthy older adults, in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders. Previous studies have reported age-related domain-specific changes in older adults, showing increased difficulty encoding and processing object information but minimal to no impairment in processing spatial information compared with younger adults. However, few of these studies have examined age-related changes in the encoding of concurrently presented object and spatial stimuli, specifically the integration of both spatial and nonspatial (object) information. To more closely resemble real-life memory encoding and the integration of both spatial and nonspatial information, the current study developed a new experimental paradigm with novel environments that allowed for the placement of different objects in different positions within the environment. The results show that older adults have decreased performance in recognizing changes of the object position within the spatial context but no significant differences in recognizing changes in the identity of the object within the spatial context compared with younger adults. These findings suggest there may be potential age-related differences in the mechanisms underlying the representations of complex environments and furthermore, the integration of spatial and nonspatial information may be differentially processed relative to independent and isolated representations of object and spatial information.