Comparative connectomics of dauer reveals developmental plasticity.

A fundamental question in neurodevelopmental biology is how flexibly the nervous system changes during development. To address this, we reconstructed the chemical connectome of dauer, an alternative developmental stage of nematodes with distinct behavioral characteristics, by volumetric reconstruction and automated synapse detection using deep learning. With the basic architecture of the nervous system preserved, structural changes in neurons, large or small, were closely associated with connectivity changes, which in turn evoked dauer-specific behaviors such as nictation. Graph theoretical analyses revealed significant dauer-specific rewiring of sensory neuron connectivity and increased clustering within motor neurons in the dauer connectome. We suggest that the nervous system in the nematode has evolved to respond to harsh environments by developing a quantitatively and qualitatively differentiated connectome.

Cognitive and psychophysiological predictors of inductive and physical discipline among parents of preschool-aged children.

Physical discipline increases children's risk of showing externalizing problems, whereas inductive discipline is negatively associated with children's risk of externalizing problems. Studies of parenting infrequently examine both positive and negative discipline techniques despite use of inductive and physical discipline being inversely related to each other and to child externalizing problems. A burgeoning literature on the biopsychosocial determinants of parenting is identifying cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying the initiation and regulation of positive and negative parenting techniques. This cross-sectional study of parents of preschool-aged children (N = 70; 89% mothers, 43% racial-ethnic minorities) advances the parenting literature by examining predictors of parents' inductive and physical discipline use across their cognitive functioning, cardiovascular psychophysiology, children's externalizing behavior, and their interactions with one another. No main effects or interactions predicted inductive discipline, but the interaction between parents' inhibitory control and nonverbal intelligence predicted physical discipline, such that parents who scored low in both domains endorsed the most use of physical discipline in response to child misbehavior. Another interaction between parents' sympathetic activity and child externalizing behavior also predicted physical discipline. These findings are discussed in relation to parenting interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Latent class analysis of maternal depression from pregnancy through early childhood: Differences in children's executive functions.

Prenatal and postpartum depression are highly prevalent worldwide, and emerging evidence suggests they contribute to impairments in children's executive functions. Studies of maternal depression, however, have focused on the postpartum and postnatal periods with relatively less consideration of prenatal influences on child development. This study of the large population-based Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children U.K. cohort estimates latent classes of maternal depression across the prenatal, postpartum, and postnatal periods to capture heterogeneity in the developmental timing and length of maternal depression, as well as to test whether latent classes differ in children's executive function impairments in middle childhood. Repeated measures latent class analysis yielded five groups demonstrating unique patterns of change in maternal depression from pregnancy through early childhood (n = 13,624). Latent classes differed in executive functions at age 8 among a subsample of children (n = 6,870). Children exposed to chronic maternal depression beginning in utero showed the most impairments in inhibitory control while accounting for child sex, verbal IQ, parents' highest education level, and average family income in childhood. The critical roles of the timing and length of children's exposure to maternal depression are discussed in relation to executive function development, prevention, and intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Testing the empirical integration of threat-deprivation and harshness-unpredictability dimensional models of adversity.

Recent dimensional models of adversity informed by a neurobiological deficit framework highlights threat and deprivation as core dimensions, whereas models informed by an evolutionary, adaptational and functional framework calls attention to harshness and unpredictability. This report seeks to evaluate an integrative model of threat, deprivation, and unpredictability, drawing on the Fragile Families Study. Confirmatory factor analysis of presumed multiple indicators of each construct reveals an adequate three-factor structure of adversity. Theory-based targeted predictions of the developmental sequelae of each dimension also received empirical support, with deprivation linked to health problems and cognitive ability; threat linked to aggression; and unpredictability to substance use and sexual risk-taking. These findings lend credibility to utility of the three-dimensional integrative framework of adversity. It could thus inform development of dimensional measures of risk assessment and exploration of multidimensional adversity profiles, sensitive to individual differences in lived experiences, supporting patient-centered, strength-based approaches to services.

Mobile Media and Young Children's Cognitive Skills: A Review.

Though the use of mobile devices (eg, tablets, smartphones) by young children is pervasive and increasing, research relating children's use of mobile devices to their development is only beginning to emerge. Learning, language development, and self-regulation skills among children aged 0 to 5 are of particular interest to pediatric clinicians, researchers, parents, and policymakers, as these skills foreshadow important outcomes across the lifespan. Experimental research reviewed herein suggests that the interactivity allowed by mobile devices has benefits over passive viewing (for example, of television) for young children's learning and self-regulation, but studies of naturalistic use suggest increased use of mobile devices is associated with poorer language and self-regulation. Pediatric clinicians can be important sources of support for families endeavoring to navigate their children's use of mobile devices by providing advice and resources, such as communicating reasonable time limits and sharing sources of developmentally appropriate content. Future research should implement innovative, rigorous research designs and methods to clarify mechanisms underlying potential negative effects of naturalistic use of mobile devices by young children and investigate how content and context of young children's mobile-device use may influence relations between such use and children's skills.

Curvilinear Relations Between Preschool-Aged Children's Effortful Control and Socioemotional Problems: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Functional Form.

The majority of studies of preschool-aged children's self-regulation presume that their higher levels of self-regulation are concurrently and prospectively associated with fewer externalizing and internalizing problems. This assumes their relations are only linear in form and negative, but studies with community samples of mostly non-Hispanic White children have found curvilinear or positive relations between self-regulation and socioemotional problems in early childhood. This cross-sectional study tests linear and quadratic relations between children's behavioral battery assessed effortful control and parent rated externalizing and internalizing problems, and whether their functional forms differ across racial-ethnic groups in a diverse sample of 2.5- to 3.5-years-olds (N = 72) from highly educated two-parent households. Child effortful control was negatively related to externalizing, quadratically related to internalizing (albeit marginally), and an interaction between effortful control and race-ethnicity indicated opposite linear relations between effortful control and internalizing problems for different racial-ethnic groups. By integrating tests of curvilinearity and interactions, this study builds on theoretical and empirical work indicating complex relations between the development of self-regulation and psychopathology.

Long-term mental health services use in children referred to a clinical intervention.

BACKGROUND: Recent advancements in pediatric mental health (MH) increased accessibility of evidence-based interventions. Yet, accessibility alone does not explain the rise in MH services use (MHSU). Maltreatment-related adversity, symptom severity, and access to early interventions have been linked to ongoing need for services, yet their joint contributions to continuities in MHSU remain unclear. OBJECTIVE: The study examines the role of maltreatment, externalizing symptom severity, and referral for early intervention in pediatric MHSU across five years. To evaluate engagement in treatment, we accounted for treatment progress and referral type, comparing MHSU in court-mandated and voluntary participants. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Participants were 321 children (M = 4.3 years; 58.9 % boys) referred to parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), an evidence-based intervention for families struggling with child disruptive behaviors and maltreating families involved with child welfare. Services were provided at a university-affiliated clinic in a metropolitan county. METHOD: Symptom severity was assessed with standardized questionnaires; maltreatment history and referral type were obtained from casefile reviews. MHSU was tracked through county behavioral health diagnostic reports. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. RESULTS: Results indicated that for the 44.9 % of children with onward referrals, the frequency of service use, but not progress in treatment, predicted ongoing services. Maltreatment emerged as a universal predictor, while externalizing predicted MHSU only in court-mandated participants, suggesting referral type contributes to quantifiable differences in MH needs. CONCLUSIONS: Findings emphasize importance of ongoing funding for pediatric MH services, and the need to explore mechanisms underlying continuous MHSU in vulnerable children.

Creating a Developmental Scale to Account for Heterotypic Continuity in Development: A Simulation Study.

Many psychological constructs show heterotypic continuity-their behavioral manifestations change with development but their meaning remains the same. However, research has paid little attention to how to account for heterotypic continuity. A promising approach to account for heterotypic continuity is creating a developmental scale using vertical scaling. A simulation was conducted to compare creating a developmental scale using vertical scaling to traditional approaches of longitudinal assessment. Traditional approaches that failed to account for heterotypic continuity resulted in less accurate growth estimates, at the person- and group level. Findings suggest that ignoring heterotypic continuity may result in faulty developmental inferences. Creating a developmental scale with vertical scaling is recommended to link different measures across time and account for heterotypic continuity.

Studying a Moving Target in Development: The Challenge and Opportunity of Heterotypic Continuity.

Many psychological constructs show heterotypic continuity-their behavioral manifestations change with development but their meaning remains the same (e.g., externalizing problems). However, research has paid little attention to how to account for heterotypic continuity. Conceptual and methodological challenges of heterotypic continuity may prevent researchers from examining lengthy developmental spans. Developmental theory requires that measurement accommodate changes in manifestation of constructs. Simulation and empirical work demonstrate that failure to account for heterotypic continuity when collecting or analyzing longitudinal data results in faulty developmental inferences. Accounting for heterotypic continuity may require using different measures across time with approaches that link measures on a comparable scale. Creating a developmental scale (i.e., developmental scaling) is recommended to link measures across time and account for heterotypic continuity, which is crucial in understanding development across the lifespan. The current synthesized review defines heterotypic continuity, describes how to identify it, and presents solutions to account for it. We note challenges of addressing heterotypic continuity, and propose steps in leveraging opportunities it creates to advance empirical study of development.

Postnatal trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms: Postpartum antecedents and differences in toddler adjustment.

Infants are uniquely vulnerable to maternal depression's noxious effects, but few longitudinal studies have tried to identify discrete postnatal trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms (MDS) beginning in infancy. This study extends evidence of heterogeneous change in postnatal MDS by examining their cross-contextual antecedents in infancy and their consequences for children's early behavior problems and language skills in late toddlerhood. A community sample of mother-child dyads (N = 235, 72% Caucasian) was assessed when children were 7, 15, and 33 months old. Mothers reported their socioeconomic status (SES), social support, marital relationship quality, family dysfunction, parenting stress, and infants' functional regulatory problems at 7 months postpartum, and children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms at 33 months. Children completed a receptive vocabulary assessment at 33 months in the lab. Latent class growth analysis identified three postnatal MDS trajectory classes that fit the data best: low-decreasing, moderate, and increasing. Psychosocial measures at seven months postpartum primarily predicted membership to these postnatal trajectory classes, which subsequently differed in children's internalizing, externalizing, and receptive vocabulary in late toddlerhood, controlling for family SES and functional regulatory problems in infancy. We discuss salient antecedents and consequences of postnatal depression for mothers and their offspring.

Sensitization of prostate cancer to radiation therapy: Molecules and pathways to target.

Radiation therapy is used to treat cancer by radiation-induced DNA damage. Despite the best efforts to eliminate cancer, some cancer cells survive irradiation, resulting in cancer progression or recurrence. Alteration in DNA damage repair pathways is common in cancers, resulting in modulation of their response to radiation. This article focuses on the recent findings about molecules and pathways that potentially can be targeted to sensitize prostate cancer cells to ionizing radiation, thereby achieving an improved therapeutic outcome.

Interactions between empathy and resting heart rate in early adolescence predict violent behavior in late adolescence and early adulthood.

BACKGROUND: Although resting heart rate (RHR) and empathy are independently and negatively associated with violent behavior, relatively little is known about the interplay between these psychophysiological and temperament-related risk factors. METHODS: Using a sample of 160 low-income, racially diverse men followed prospectively from infancy through early adulthood, this study examined whether RHR and empathy during early adolescence independently and interactively predict violent behavior and related correlates in late adolescence and early adulthood. RESULTS: Controlling for child ethnicity, family income, and child antisocial behavior at age 12, empathy inversely predicted moral disengagement and juvenile petitions for violent crimes, while RHR was unrelated to all measures of violent behavior. Interactive effects were also evident such that among men with lower but not higher levels of RHR, lower empathy predicted increased violent behavior, as indexed by juvenile arrests for violent offenses, peer-reported violent behavior at age 17, self-reported moral disengagement at age 17, and self-reported violent behavior at age 20. CONCLUSIONS: Implications for prevention and intervention are considered. Specifically, targeting empathic skills among individuals at risk for violent behavior because of specific psychophysiological profiles may lead to more impactful interventions.

Trajectories of child externalizing problems between ages 3 and 10 years: Contributions of children's early effortful control, theory of mind, and parenting experiences.

Preventing problem behavior requires an understanding of earlier factors that are amenable to intervention. The main goals of our prospective longitudinal study were to trace trajectories of child externalizing behavior between ages 3 and 10 years, and to identify patterns of developmentally significant child and parenting risk factors that differentiated pathways of problem behavior. Participants were 218 3-year-old boys and girls who were reassessed following the transition to kindergarten (age 5-6 years) and during the late school-age years (age 10). Mothers contributed ratings of children's externalizing behavior at all three time points. Children's self-regulation abilities and theory of mind were assessed during a laboratory visit, and parenting risk (frequent corporal punishment and low maternal warmth) was assessed using interview-based and questionnaire measures. Four developmental trajectories of externalizing behavior yielded the best balance of parsimony and fit with our longitudinal data and latent class growth analysis. Most young children followed a pathway marked by relatively low levels of symptoms that continued to decrease across the school-age years. Atypical trajectories marked chronically high, increasing, and decreasing levels of externalizing problems across early and middle childhood. Three-year-old children with low levels of effortful control were far more likely to show the chronic pattern of elevated externalizing problems than changing or low patterns. Early parental corporal punishment and maternal warmth, respectively, differentiated preschoolers who showed increasing and decreasing patterns of problem behavior compared to the majority of children. The fact that children's poor effortful regulation skills predicted chronic early onset problems reinforces the need for early childhood screening and intervention services.

Early Childhood Predictors of Severe Youth Violence in Low-Income Male Adolescents.

Using a cohort of 310 low-income male adolescents living in an urban community and followed prospectively from 18 months through adolescence (ages 15-18 years), the current study examined whether individual, family, and community risk factors from ages 18 to 42 months were associated with adolescents' violent behavior, as indexed by juvenile petitions. Results of multivariate analyses indicated that although family income was the only factor to discriminate those with no arrest record from those with nonviolent arrests, rejecting parenting, child oppositional behavior, emotion regulation, and minority status during the toddler period contributed unique variance in distinguishing male adolescents arrested for violent behavior compared to those never arrested and those arrested for nonviolent behavior. Implications for prevention efforts are discussed.

The interaction between monoamine oxidase A and punitive discipline in the development of antisocial behavior: Mediation by maladaptive social information processing.

Previous studies demonstrate that boys' monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) genotype interacts with adverse rearing environments in early childhood, including punitive discipline, to predict later antisocial behavior. Yet the mechanisms by which MAOA and punitive parenting interact during childhood to amplify risk for antisocial behavior are not well understood. In the present study, hostile attributional bias and aggressive response generation during middle childhood, salient aspects of maladaptive social information processing, were tested as possible mediators of this relation in a sample of 187 low-income men followed prospectively from infancy into early adulthood. Given racial-ethnic variation in MAOA allele frequencies, analyses were conducted separately by race. In both African American and Caucasian men, those with the low-activity MAOA allele who experienced more punitive discipline at age 1.5 generated more aggressive responses to perceived threat at age 10 relative to men with the high-activity variant. In the African American subsample only, formal mediation analyses indicated a marginally significant indirect effect of maternal punitiveness on adult arrest records via aggressive response generation in middle childhood. The findings suggest that maladaptive social information processing may be an important mechanism underlying the association between MAOA × Parenting interactions and antisocial behavior in early adulthood. The present study extends previous work in the field by demonstrating that MAOA and harsh parenting assessed in early childhood interact to not only predict antisocial behavior in early adulthood, but also predict social information processing, a well-established social-cognitive correlate of antisocial behavior.

The long-term effectiveness of the Family Check-Up on school-age conduct problems: Moderation by neighborhood deprivation.

Several studies suggest that neighborhood deprivation is a unique risk factor in child and adolescent development of problem behavior. We sought to examine whether previously established intervention effects of the Family Check-Up (FCU) on child conduct problems at age 7.5 would persist through age 9.5, and whether neighborhood deprivation would moderate these effects. In addition, we examined whether improvements in parent-child interaction during early childhood associated with the FCU would be related to later reductions in child aggression among families living in the highest risk neighborhoods. Using a multisite cohort of at-risk children identified on the basis of family, child, and socioeconomic risk and randomly assigned to the FCU, intervention effects were found to be moderated by neighborhood deprivation, such that they were only directly present for those living at moderate versus extreme levels of neighborhood deprivation. In addition, improvements in child aggression were evident for children living in extreme neighborhood deprivation when parents improved the quality of their parent-child interaction during the toddler period (i.e., moderated mediation). Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the possibilities and possible limitations in prevention of early problem behavior for those children living in extreme and moderate levels of poverty.

Predicting violent behavior: The role of violence exposure and future educational aspirations during adolescence.

Few researchers have explored future educational aspirations as a promotive factor against exposure to community violence in relation to adolescents' violent behavior over time. The present study examined the direct and indirect effect of exposure to community violence prior to 9th grade on attitudes about violence and violent behavior in 12th grade, and violent behavior at age 22 via 9th grade future educational aspirations in a sample of urban African American youth (n = 681; 49% male). Multi-group SEM was used to test the moderating effect of gender. Exposure to violence was associated with lower future educational aspirations. For boys, attitudes about violence directly predicted violent behavior at age 22. For boys, future educational aspirations indirectly predicted less violent behavior at age 22. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Maladaptive social information processing in childhood predicts young men's atypical amygdala reactivity to threat.

BACKGROUND: Maladaptive social information processing, such as hostile attributional bias and aggressive response generation, is associated with childhood maladjustment. Although social information processing problems are correlated with heightened physiological responses to social threat, few studies have examined their associations with neural threat circuitry, specifically amygdala activation to social threat. METHODS: A cohort of 310 boys participated in an ongoing longitudinal study and completed questionnaires and laboratory tasks assessing their social and cognitive characteristics the boys were between 10 and 12 years of age. At age 20, 178 of these young men underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging and a social threat task. At age 22, adult criminal arrest records and self-reports of impulsiveness were obtained. RESULTS: Path models indicated that maladaptive social information-processing at ages 10 and 11 predicted increased left amygdala reactivity to fear faces, an ambiguous threat, at age 20 while accounting for childhood antisocial behavior, empathy, IQ, and socioeconomic status. Exploratory analyses indicated that aggressive response generation - the tendency to respond to threat with reactive aggression - predicted left amygdala reactivity to fear faces and was concurrently associated with empathy, antisocial behavior, and hostile attributional bias, whereas hostile attributional bias correlated with IQ. Although unrelated to social information-processing problems, bilateral amygdala reactivity to anger faces at age 20 was unexpectedly predicted by low IQ at age 11. Amygdala activation did not mediate associations between social information processing and number of criminal arrests, but both impulsiveness at age 22 and arrests were correlated with right amygdala reactivity to anger facial expressions at age 20. CONCLUSIONS: Childhood social information processing and IQ predicted young men's amygdala response to threat a decade later, which suggests that childhood social-cognitive characteristics are associated with the development of neural threat processing and adult adjustment.