Developmental Change and Correlates of Autonomy in Asian American Adolescents.

Although establishing a sense of autonomy has been long thought to be a fundamental developmental task, there are still gaps in literature in terms of how autonomy changes over time and interacts with other important factors in adolescents' lives. In the present study, 158 (60% female; 74% second generation) Asian Americans were followed throughout high school and surveyed for self-reported autonomy, parent-child closeness, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms each year. Hierarchical linear modeling investigated whether autonomy changed over time, whether yearly changes in autonomy were related to changes in parent-child closeness, and whether both constructs were associated with adjustment. The results indicated that, although autonomy did not linearly increase over the high school years, intra-individual increases in autonomy were associated with increases in father-child closeness. Effects of mother-child closeness were similar, but only approached statistical significance. Autonomy and closeness to mother were each positively associated with self-esteem, and their interactive effect on depressive symptoms was also significant, which suggests that both autonomy and relatedness with mother are important for Asian American adolescents' psychological well-being.

Vulnerabilities in sequencing and task switching in healthy youth offspring of parents with mood disorders.

INTRODUCTION: Visuospatial processing and task switching are impaired in individuals with mood disorders. It is unknown whether early deficits are present before mood symptom on set or are related to risk for a specific type of mood disorder. To investigate, we compared visual attention and task switching during sequencing among never-disordered youth with parental family histories of bipolar (BD) and major depressive disorders (MDD) and healthy controls (HC) with no personal or family history of psychopathology. METHOD: 8-17-year-old youth of parents with BD (n = 31, "BD-risk"), youth of parents with MDD (n = 49, "MDD-risk"), and demographically similar HC (n = 31, "HC") were examined using the Delis-Kaplan Executive Functioning System Trail Making Test. Seed-based resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) was collected from a subset of 88 participants (25 BD-risk, 37 MDD-risk, 26 HC) to investigate group differences in RSFC related to visuospatial processing. RESULTS: BD-risk and MDD-risk offspring had impaired sequencing and task switching, demonstrated by reduced scores on visual scanning, F(2, 108) = 4.12, p = .02, number sequencing, F(2, 88) = 4.75, p = .01, letter sequencing, F(2, 108) = 4.24, p = .02, and number-letter sequencing, F(2, 108) = 4.66, p = .01, compared to scores in HC. RSFC between the posterior cingulate (PCC) and clusters in the subcallosal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus significantly differed among HC, BD-risk, and MDD-risk groups. PCC-subcallosal/limbic RSFC was positively coupled in the MDD-risk and BD-risk groups and negatively coupled in HCs. CONCLUSIONS: Youth at familial risk for mood disorders demonstrate visuospatial deficits early in the processing stream. Improved methods for identifying at-risk children with the earliest possible neurocognitive impairments may inform remediation strategies that could prevent mood disorders.

Interoceptive awareness, positive affect, and decision making in major depressive disorder.

BACKGROUND: Little work has examined the relation between interoceptive awareness and symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Existing research suggests that depressed individuals exhibit impaired heartbeat perception, though the results of this research have been equivocal. Importantly, depressed participants in these studies have had comorbid anxiety disorders, making it difficult to draw inferences about interoceptive awareness in MDD. The current study addresses this issue by assessing heartbeat perception in depressed women without current anxiety disorders and exploring the relation between interoception and perturbations in both affective intensity and decision making, components of MDD postulated to be related to bodily awareness. METHODS: Depressed women without concurrent anxiety disorders (n=25) and never-disordered controls (n=36) performed a heartbeat perception task. Participants completed the self-report Affect Intensity Measure (AIM), and decision-making difficulty was assessed in MDD participants using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. RESULTS: Depressed women exhibited poorer heartbeat perception accuracy than did control participants. Impaired accuracy in MDD participants was associated with reduced positive affectivity and difficulty in decision making. LIMITATIONS: Our sample was composed exclusively of females and was heterogeneous with respect to treatment status, thereby limiting our ability to generalize results to depressed males and to exclude the contribution of exogenous factors to the observed group differences. CONCLUSIONS: Results of this study suggest that for depressed individuals without anxiety comorbidities, disrupted perception of bodily responses reduces both the experience of positive arousal and the ability to use interoceptive feedback to inform decision making.