The role of the parent-child relationship in fostering resilience in American Indian/Alaskan Native children.

Resilience is a key characteristic to study in families, particularly those who have experienced significant systemic risk factors. While much resilience research focuses on ethnic and cultural minorities, little research focuses specifically on American Indian/Alaskan Native (AI/AN) families. The parent-child relationship has been demonstrated to be a key characteristic in families, and this relationship may also serve as a protective factor for AI/AN families. Positive parent-child relationships are consistently linked to positive child outcomes, and parental psychological symptoms are linked with child psychological symptoms in non-Native families. These associations warrant further examination among AI/AN families. We hypothesized that the parent-child relationship would moderate the link between parent distress (i.e., depressive and anxious symptoms) and child internalizing problems in a sample of 57 AI/AN parents of children 3-5 years of age. As expected, the parent-child relationship moderated the associations between parent anxiety symptoms and child internalizing symptoms, and between parent depressive symptoms and child internalizing symptoms. Furthermore, the strength of the parent-child relationship buffered the effects of parent distress on child internalizing symptoms. Results highlight the potentially protective role of strong parent-child relationships in AI/AN families.

Adverse childhood experiences and cognitive function among adults with excess adiposity.

BACKGROUND: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and obesity are independently associated with brain/neurocognitive health. Despite a growing emphasis on the importance of early life adversity on health, the relationship between ACEs and neurocognition in adults with overweight/obesity is unclear. The objective was to examine associations between self-reported ACEs and measured neurocognitive domains in a sample of adults with overweight/obesity. METHODS: Participants were 95 predominantly white, highly educated adult women (76% female, 81% Caucasian, and 75% ≥ bachelor's degree) with excess adiposity enrolled in the Cognitive and Self-regulatory Mechanisms of Obesity Study. ACEs and fluid/crystallized neurocognitive domains were measured at baseline using the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale and the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery and Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metric, respectively. RESULTS: Higher ACEs scores were negatively correlated with fluid cognition (r = -.34, P < .001) but not crystallized cognition (r = .01, ns). Individuals with 3 and 4+ ACEs displayed significantly lower fluid cognition scores than those with fewer ACEs F 4,89 = 3.24, P < .05. After accounting for body mass index (BMI), age, sex, race, and education, higher ACEs scores were still associated with poorer performance on overall fluid cognition (ß = -.36, P < .01), along with the following subtests: Stroop Colour/Word test (ß = -.23, P < .05), Go/No-Go omissions (ß = .29, P < .01), and Picture Sequence Memory task (ß = -.30, P < .01). CONCLUSIONS: The role of ACEs in health may be related to their associations with executive function and episodic neurocognitive domains essential to cognitive processing and self-regulation. Obesity science should further examine the role of ACEs and neurocognition in obesity prevention, prognosis, and treatment using more rigorous, prospective designs and more diverse samples.