Using randomized controlled trials to ask questions regarding developmental psychopathology: A tribute to Dante Cicchetti.

Dante Cicchetti, the architect of developmental psychopathology, has influenced so many of us in profound ways. One of his many contributions was in demonstrating the power of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to study the effects of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP). These RCTs have shed light on causal mechanisms in development. Following Cicchetti and colleagues' work, we designed a brief home visiting program, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), to help parents respond in sensitive, nurturing ways, so as to enhance children's attachment and self-regulatory capabilities. In the current study, we assessed adolescents' reports of the closeness of their relationships with their mothers 12 years after their mothers completed the intervention. A total of 142 adolescents participated (47 randomized to ABC, 45 randomized to a control intervention, and 50 from a low-risk comparison group). Adolescents whose mothers had been randomized to ABC reported closer relationships with their mothers than adolescents randomized to the control condition, with significant differences seen on approval, support, companionship, and emotional support subscales. Consistent with Cicchetti et al.'s work, these results provide powerful evidence of the long-term effects of an early parenting intervention.

Is Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up effective for parents with insecure attachment states of mind?

Prior research suggests that attachment-based interventions, including Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), may be less effective at enhancing parenting quality among parents who self-report having an insecure attachment style. The current study tested whether effects of ABC on parental behavior were moderated by categorical and dimensional measures of attachment obtained via Adult Attachment Interviews with 454 parents who were approximately 34 years old, primarily female, and predominantly White or African American. Parents randomized to ABC exhibited higher sensitivity and positive regard, and lower intrusiveness shortly after the intervention than parents randomized to the control intervention (|ß|s = .10-.27). The effect of ABC on intrusiveness persisted 2 years later. Effects at either timepoint were not significantly moderated by parents' attachment representations.

Mothers and friends as listeners for adolescent anger narration: Distinct developmental affordances.

Narrating emotional experiences to important others contributes to socioemotional and self-development from early childhood through adulthood. However, to date, almost no work has explored the distinctive ways that different listeners might shape narration, and the socioemotional outcomes of narrating experience. The present study examines how early adolescents (n = 106, age range 12-14, 54 girls, 21% low-income, 7% Latinx, 3% non-White) narrate anger experiences to mothers and close same-sex friends. Our findings suggest that these two listeners provide distinct affordances for narration, with implications for emotions and learning. Mothers provide a more elaborative, emotion-focused narrative context, whereas friends provide a playful, creative narrative context. Friends elicit larger reductions in distress than mothers, although listener-associated differences in learning were more complex. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for narrative development specifically as well as more generally for relatively underexamined aspects of narrative across adolescence and adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Consequences of Inadequate Caregiving for Children's Attachment, Neurobiological Development, and Adaptive Functioning.

Given that human infants are almost fully reliant on caregivers for survival, the presence of parents who provide sensitive, responsive care support infants and young children in developing the foundation for optimal biological functioning. Conversely, when parents are unavailable or insensitive, there are consequences for infants' and children's attachment and neurobiological development. In this paper, we describe effects of inadequate parenting on children's neurobiological and behavioral development, with a focus on developing capacities for executive functioning, emotion regulation, and other important cognitive-affective processes. Most prior research has examined correlational associations among these constructs. Given that interventions tested through randomized clinical trials allow for causal inferences, we review longitudinal intervention effects on children's biobehavioral and cognitive-affective outcomes. In particular, we provide an overview of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study in which children were randomized to continue in orphanage care (typically the most extreme condition of privation) or were placed into the homes of trained, supported foster parents. We also discuss findings regarding Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, an intervention enhancing sensitivity among high-risk parents. We conclude by suggesting future directions for research in this area.

A replication and extension of the interpersonal process model of demand/withdraw behavior: Incorporating subjective emotional experience.

The demand/withdraw (D/W) interaction pattern is a maladaptive cycle of behavior that is associated with a wide range of deleterious individual and relational outcomes. Partners' emotional responding during couple conflict has long been theorized to play a central role in the occurrence of D/W. The interpersonal process model of D/W behavior suggests that each partner's emotional responses are associated with their own as well as the other partner's behavior in the D/W cycle and that the nature of these associations varies across partners. A prior test of the interpersonal process model provided support for sex- and role-specific associations between vocal emotional expression and demanding and withdrawing behaviors. The current study expands the conceptual frame of the interpersonal process model by incorporating subjective emotional experience. Hypothesized associations between subjective emotional experience, emotional expression, and role-specific demanding and withdrawing behaviors were tested in a sample of 59 couples using an actor-partner interdependence model. Results reveal that spouses experience and express nonsignificantly different levels of negative affect but strongly differ in how the experience and expression of those emotions are related to demanding and withdrawing behaviors. High levels of women's demanding behavior were associated with the combination of experiencing and expressing high levels of negative affect, while high levels of men's withdrawing behavior were associated with experiencing high levels of negative affect but expressing low levels of negative affect. Implications of results for understanding emotional processes in maladaptive cycles and for clinical practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

"I didn't want to, but then I told": Adolescents' narratives regarding disclosure, concealment, and lying.

This study examined 131 U.S. middle class early, middle, and late adolescents' (Mage = 12.74, 15.81, and 20.40 years, respectively) narratives regarding experiences of disclosure, concealment, and lying to parents and responses to direct probes about lessons learned about self and parents. The thematic content focused primarily on routine activities and peer experiences, and to a lesser extent, romantic issues, risky or delinquent behavior, and academic achievement, with few content differences across narrative types. Greater psychological elaboration in narratives and, when directly probed, more evidence of psychological growth and positive lessons about parents, were observed when teens disclosed than concealed or lied. There was less factual elaboration when youth narrated about concealment than disclosure or lying, particularly among early adolescent males as compared to older males and same-age females. Narrative coherence increased with age and was greater in females' than males' lying narratives. Thus, adolescents learn different lessons from disclosing, concealing, and lying, with varying implications for the development of self, identity, and moral agency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Stories for all ages: Narrating anger reduces distress across childhood and adolescence.

The study's goals were twofold: (a) to examine the effectiveness of narrating an angry experience, compared with relying on distraction or mere reexposure to the experience, for anger reduction across childhood and adolescence, and (b) to identify the features of narratives that are associated with more and less anger reduction for younger and older youths and for boys and girls. Participants were 241 youths (117 boys) between the ages of 8 and 17. When compared with mere reexposure, narration was effective at reducing youth's anger both concurrently and in lasting ways; though narration was less effective than distraction at concurrently reducing anger, its effect was longer lasting. Contrary to expectation, there were no overall age differences in the relative effectiveness of narration for anger reduction; however, the analyses of the quality of youth's narratives and of the relations between various narrative features and reductions in anger indicated that narration works to reduce distress among youth via processes that are distinct from those postulated for adults. Altogether, this study's findings lend strong support to the potential of narration for helping youth across a broad age range manage anger experiences in ways that can reduce distress. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cardiovascular Reactivity During Marital Conflict in Laboratory and Naturalistic Settings: Differential Associations with Relationship and Individual Functioning Across Contexts.

Cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict is considered to be one of the main pathways for relationship distress to impact physical, mental, and relationship health. However, the magnitude of association between cardiovascular reactivity during laboratory marital conflict and relationship functioning is small and inconsistent given the scope of its importance in theoretical models of intimate relationships. This study tests the possibility that cardiovascular data collected in laboratory settings downwardly bias the magnitude of these associations when compared to measures obtained in naturalistic settings. Ambulatory cardiovascular reactivity data were collected from 20 couples during two relationship conflicts in a research laboratory, two planned relationship conflicts at couples' homes, and two spontaneous relationship conflicts during couples' daily lives. Associations between self-report measures of relationship functioning, individual functioning, and cardiovascular reactivity across settings are tested using multilevel models. Cardiovascular reactivity was significantly larger during planned and spontaneous relationship conflicts in naturalistic settings than during planned relationship conflicts in the laboratory. Similarly, associations with relationship and individual functioning variables were statistically significantly larger for cardiovascular data collected in naturalistic settings than the same data collected in the laboratory. Our findings suggest that cardiovascular reactivity during spousal conflict in naturalistic settings is statistically significantly different from that elicited in laboratory settings both in magnitude and in the pattern of associations with a wide range of inter- and intrapersonal variables. These differences in findings across laboratory and naturalistic physiological responses highlight the value of testing physiological phenomena across interaction contexts in romantic relationships.

Graphic methods for interpreting longitudinal dyadic patterns from repeated-measures actor-partner interdependence models.

Researchers commonly use repeated-measures actor-partner interdependence models (RM-APIM) to understand how romantic partners change in relation to one another over time. However, traditional interpretations of the results of these models do not fully or correctly capture the dyadic temporal patterns estimated in RM-APIM. Interpretation of results from these models largely focuses on the meaning of single-parameter estimates in isolation from all the others. However, considering individual coefficients separately impedes the understanding of how these associations combine to produce an interdependent pattern that emerges over time. Additionally, positive within-person, or actor, effects are commonly misinterpreted as indicating growth from one time point to the next when they actually represent decline. We suggest that change-as-outcome RM-APIMs and vector field diagrams (VFDs) can be used to improve the understanding and presentation of dyadic patterns of association described by standard RM-APIMs. The current article briefly reviews the conceptual foundations of RM-APIMs, demonstrates how change-as-outcome RM-APIMs and VFDs can aid interpretation of standard RM-APIMs, and provides a tutorial in making VFDs using multilevel modeling. (PsycINFO Database Record

The feeling of the story: Narrating to regulate anger and sadness.

Admonitions to tell one's story in order to feel better reflect the belief that narrative is an effective emotion regulation tool. The present studies evaluate the effectiveness of narrative for regulating sadness and anger, and provide quantitative comparisons of narrative with distraction, reappraisal, and reexposure. The results for sadness (n = 93) and anger (n = 89) reveal that narrative is effective at down-regulating negative emotions, particularly when narratives place events in the past tense and include positive emotions. The results suggest that if people tell the "right" kind of story about their experiences, narrative reduces emotional distress linked to those experiences.

And I Shot Her: On War, and the Creation of Inequities in the Development of Youths' Moral Capacities.

War creates a multifaceted web of inequities that encompass most levels of the ecology of youth development. These include psychosocial inequities bearing on war-exposed youth's limited access to medical and educational services and job-training and employment opportunities, as well as some of the unique psychological sequelae of trauma exposure. In this chapter we put forth a twofold argument. First, we argue that the protracted hardships of war also create enduring psychological inequities that go beyond the well-documented psychosocial needs and psychological trauma, and encompass other aspects of youths' healthy development; these are inequities inasmuch as they represent profound alterations of the developmental pathways available to war-affected youth. Second, we maintain that the psychological sciences must strive to understand such longstanding developmental inequities even if we do not, at this time, have the tools to fully address them.

Children's and Adolescents' Accounts of Helping and Hurting Others: Lessons About the Development of Moral Agency.

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7-, 11-, and 16-year-olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more references to consequences of acts and psychological conflicts. With age, however, youth increasingly described the consequences of helping. Reasons for harming others focused especially on the narrator's perspective whereas reasons for helping others were centered on others' perspectives. With age, youth increasingly drew self-related insights from their helpful, but not their harmful, actions. Results illuminate how reflections on prosocial and transgressive experiences may provide distinct opportunities for constructing moral agency.

The construction of moral agency in mother-child conversations about helping and hurting across childhood and adolescence.

This study examined mother-child conversations about children's and adolescents' past harmful and helpful actions. The sample included 100 mothers and their 7-, 11-, or 16-year-old children; each dyad discussed events when the child (a) helped a friend and (b) hurt a friend. Analyses suggested that conversations about help may serve to facilitate children's sense of themselves as prosocial moral agents; mothers focused on children's feelings of pride, positive judgments of the child's behavior, and positive insights about the child's characteristics that could be drawn from the event. In turn, conversations about harm were more elaborated and contentious than those about help, and reflected more complex maternal goals; although mothers highlighted children's wrongdoing (e.g., by noting negative consequences of the child's actions for others), they also engaged in a variety of strategies that may support children's ability to reconcile their harmful actions with a positive self-view (e.g., by noting what children did do well or their capacity for repair). With respect to age effects, results revealed that older children played an increasingly active and spontaneous role in discussions. Furthermore, as compared with 7-year-olds, conversations with 11- and 16-year-olds focused more on psychological insights that could be drawn from experiences and less on children's concrete harmful and helpful actions. Overall, results illuminate the processes whereby conversations with mothers may further children's developing understandings of their own and others' moral agency, and how discussions of prosocial and transgressive moral experiences may provide distinct but complementary opportunities for moral socialization.