Childhood inhibition predicts adolescent social anxiety: Findings from a longitudinal twin study.

An enduring issue in the study of mental health is identifying developmental processes that explain how childhood characteristics progress to maladaptive forms. We examine the role that behavioral inhibition (BI) has on social anxiety (SA) during adolescence in 868 families of twins assessed at ages 8, 13, and 15 years. Multimodal assessments of BI and SA were completed at each phase, with additional measures (e.g., parenting stress) for parents and twins. Analyses were conducted in several steps: first, we used a cross-lagged panel model to demonstrate bidirectional paths between BI and SA; second a biometric Cholesky decomposition showed that both genetic and environmental influences on childhood BI also affect adolescent SA; next, multilevel phenotypic models tested moderation effects between BI and SA. We tested seven potential moderators of the BI to SA prediction in individual models and included only those that emerged as significant in a final conditional model examining predictors of SA. Though several main effects emerged as significant, only parenting stress had a significant interaction with BI to predict SA, highlighting the importance of environmental moderators in models examining temperamental effects on later psychological symptoms. This comprehensive assessment continues to build the prototype for such developmental psychopathology models.

Longitudinal Research at the Interface of Affective Neuroscience, Developmental Psychopathology, Health and Behavioral Genetics: Findings from the Wisconsin Twin Project.

The Wisconsin Twin Project comprises multiple longitudinal studies that span infancy to early adulthood. We summarize recent papers that show how twin designs with deep phenotyping, including biological measures, can inform questions about phenotypic structure, etiology, comorbidity, heterogeneity, and gene-environment interplay of temperamental constructs and mental and physical health conditions of children and adolescents. The general framework for investigations begins with rich characterization of early temperament and follows with study of experiences and exposures across childhood and adolescence. Many studies incorporate neuroimaging and hormone assays.

Brooding, Inattention, and Impulsivity as Predictors of Adolescent Suicidal Ideation.

Although suicide remains a leading cause of death for adolescents, risk factors beyond diagnoses and suicide attempt history remain unclear. We examined whether cognitive style and temperament impact risk for an early, yet still clinically relevant and distressing, form of suicidality: active suicidal ideation. We used binary logistic regression to test whether brooding, inattention, and impulsivity predicted significantly increased risk for suicidal ideation in a sample of 134 twins, 46 of whom endorsed active suicidal ideation (i.e., probands), as well as probands' cotwins and matched controls. When comparing probands with controls and controlling for depression diagnoses, brooding (B = 0.73, Odds Ratio [OR] = 2.07, p = 0.021), inattention (B = 1.09, OR = 2.98, p < 0.001), and impulsivity (B = 0.91, OR = 2.47, p = 0.001) differentiated probands from controls, individually. We compared probands with their cotwins using the same approach, which allowed us to account for variance in suicidal ideation risk related to twins' shared, familial characteristics (e.g., prenatal environment, neighborhood); inattention was the only significant predictor of suicidal ideation risk (B = 0.66, OR = 1.93, p = 0.020). We then fit a logistic regression model that included all three predictors. Only inattention predicted significantly increased likelihood of suicidal ideation in proband versus controls and proband versus cotwin comparisons (B = 0.88, OR = 2.40, p = 0.024 and B = 0.67, OR = 1.96, p = 0.045, respectively). These results highlight the potential utility of examining novel, more proximal risk factors for suicidal ideation in addition to more established distal factors, like suicide attempt history and psychiatric diagnoses.