International Journal of Behavioral Development最新文献

Background: Irritability comprises a set of behaviors that span normal:abnormal proneness to anger. When dysregulated and developmentally atypical, irritability indicates neurodevelopmental vulnerability for mental health problems. Yet, mental health risk indicators such as irritability likely present differently during specific developmental stages, especially across the crucial transition from preschool to early school age, when the presence of sustained elevated irritability predicts psychiatric disorders, increased impairment, and service use in school-age children. The goal of this study is to chart how behavioral manifestations of irritability unfold and shift across the developmental transition from preschool to early school age and identify key irritability behaviors that are most strongly predictive of other irritability behaviors in the next developmental stage.

Methods: The sample was drawn from the Multidimensional Assessment of Preschoolers Study (MAPS, N=382), a diverse early childhood sample enriched for psychopathology via oversampling for disruptive behavior and family violence exposure. Objective frequency of normative to severe irritability captured as tantrum features and irritable mood across contexts were longitudinally measured at preschool- (M_age=4.49 years, SD=0.83) and early school-age (M_age=7.08, SD=0.94) using the developmentally specified Multidimensional Assessment Profile Scales-Temper Loss. A cross-lagged panel network was estimated to depict the longitudinal predictive connections between individual irritability items from preschool to early school age.

Results: The strongest cross-lagged association was hit/bit/kick during a tantrum at preschool predicting tantrums in normative contexts at early school age. Severe tantrum behaviors (e.g., hit/bite/kick) and difficulty recovering from anger/tantrums at preschool age are key irritability behaviors that predict the development of widespread irritability features in early school age, including severity and length of tantrums, tantrums across contexts, and irritable mood expressions. As development unfolds, severe and violent irritable behaviors in preschool age influence a wide range of less dysregulated irritable behaviors, yet expressed at developmentally abnormally high frequencies, during early school age.

Conclusions: Highlighting the central behavioral indicators of irritability and how expressions change over the crucial transition from preschool to early school age can inform pragmatic clinical screening measures to identify children who experience high levels of key irritability behaviors (i.e., severe tantrums or difficulty recovering from anger or tantrums in preschool-age) and novel interventions to target these behaviors and interrupt the clinical cascade toward entrenched psychiatric disorders.

This two-wave study investigated whether the concurrent and prospective effects of internalizing symptoms and peer status (being liked/disliked) on peer-reported and self-reported victimization were moderated by the classroom prevalence of internalizing symptoms and peer status, respectively, and by classroom size. Multilevel regression analyses were conducted with data collected from 2,641 Finnish secondary school students (M _age = 13.71; 48.8% girls) at the beginning (September 2022) and in the middle of the school year (January 2023). Concurrently, higher levels of internalizing problems and lower status were associated with higher peer-reported and self-reported victimization, but these associations were not moderated by the classroom prevalence of these individual characteristics nor by classroom size. Longitudinally, higher levels of internalizing problems and lower status predicted more self-reported victimization 5 months later, but only lower status predicted higher peer-reported victimization over time. No moderating effect of the classroom features of interest were found.

The dysregulation profile (DP) in youth is characterized by severe emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dysregulation and is associated with an increased risk for psychiatric disorders. Adolescent self-regulation has important implications for adulthood outcomes, yet this association is understudied in the context of the DP in emerging adults. Using a Canadian adolescent sample (N = 662; M _age = 15.52), a dimensional approach to the DP was taken and associations between adolescent DP scores and educational, occupational and substance use outcomes in emerging adulthood (M _age = 25.77) were examined. Latent profile analysis revealed: a highly problematic group with elevated DP scores (n = 59; 8.9%); an average problems group with average DP scores (n = 285; 43.1%); and a low problems group with below average DP scores (n = 318; 48%). The highly problematic group reported the lowest occupational statuses, and the highest prevalence of unemployment and substance dependencies. These results demonstrate the impact of subthreshold adolescent DP scores on emerging adulthood outcomes.

Maternal depression is a global public health concern with far-reaching impacts on child development, yet our understanding of mechanisms remains incomplete. This study examined whether parenting mediates the association between maternal depression and child outcomes. Participants included 841 rural Pakistani mother-child dyads (50% female). Maternal depression was measured at 12 months postpartum, parenting behaviors (warmth, stimulation, and harsh parenting) were measured at 24 months, and child outcomes (mental health, socioemotional development, and cognitive skills) were measured at 36 months. Maternal depression predicted increased harsh parenting, child mental health difficulties, and child socioemotional concerns; however, there was little evidence for parenting as a mediator between maternal depression and child outcomes. Sex-stratified results are discussed, and findings are situated in context.

Background: Understanding of preterm infant cognitive competences across the first year of life is limited regarding the developmental constructs of continuity, stability, coherence, and predictive validity as well as how they manifest by age and country of origin.

Aims: This prospective longitudinal study examined and compared mean-level continuity, individual-differences stability, and associations among several cognitive competences as well as their predictive validity across the first year of life in preterm infants (gestational age range = 26 - 33 weeks) from Chile (n = 47), the United Kingdom (n = 48), and the United States (n = 50).

Methods: Multiple cognitive competences (visual acuity measured with the Teller acuity card procedure; information processing duration of visual fixation and novelty preference examined with the Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence; Bayley Mental and Psychomotor Indexes) were evaluated at 5 different ages in preterm infants between 2 and 12 months in each country.

Results: The effects of infant age, country, and their interaction were examined. Visual acuity increased over time with different trajectories across countries, whereas duration of visual fixation decreased; both were stable across time. Novelty preference demonstrated continuity, but not stability across time and country. Associations among different cognitive competences varied by country. Across countries, duration of visual fixation predicted the Bayley Mental Development Index, and visual acuity predicted the Bayley Psychomotor Development Index.

Conclusions and implications: Cognitive competences develop in similar and dissimilar ways across the first year of life in infants born preterm from different countries. Cultural specificities and age variations are discussed. Study findings underscore the necessity to attend to specificities of domain, age, and place when assessing preterm infants' cognitive competences.

Childhood is a critical period for the development of prosocial behavior, and the family serves as a crucial microsystem for fostering prosocial behavior in children. Prior research has indicated that parental monitoring, a specific family factor directly targeting children, can predict children's prosocial behavior. However, the influence of the overall family climate on children's prosocial behavior remains unclear. This study focuses on different levels of family factors and examines the dynamic longitudinal effects of both parental monitoring and family conflict, simultaneously, on children's prosocial behavior. Three-wave data from 4691 children (M _{baseline age} = 9.480, SD = .507; 48.2% female) in the ABCD database were analyzed. The results of the Cross-Lagged Panel Model revealed significant longitudinal mutual predictive relations among family conflict, parental monitoring, and children's prosocial behavior. After disentangling between-person associations, the findings from the Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model showed that increasing parental monitoring consistently predicted future increases in child prosocial behavior from childhood to early adolescence, and reducing family conflict significantly predicted future increases in prosocial behavior during early adolescence. These findings underscore the importance of considering not only specific family factors that directly target the child, but also holistic family factors such as family conflict in shaping positive child development.

Five issues about three cognitive caregiving practices are addressed in mothers, fathers, and children's other caregivers in nationally representative samples from 51 low- and middle-income countries with 159,959 36- to 59-month-old children. The five issues include base rates of cognitive caregiving practices of mothers, fathers, and other caregivers of young children, associations of cognitive caregiving practices of the three caregivers with children's development, associations among the three caregivers' cognitive caregiving practices, comparison of the three caregivers' cognitive caregiving practices with girls and boys, and assessments of how overall national development relates to the three caregivers' cognitive caregiving practices. The data addressing these five issues derive from the maternal reports in UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. Mothers engaged in the most cognitive caregiving, followed by other caregivers, and then fathers. Each caregiver's cognitive caregiving was uniquely associated with children's development, but in models that included all three caregivers' caregiving simultaneously mothers' cognitive caregiving had the largest association. In addition, mothers' and fathers' cognitive caregiving practices covaried, but their cognitive caregiving practices were unrelated to those of their children's other caregivers. Girls and boys experienced similar levels of cognitive caregiving from the three caregivers. The higher a country's level of human development, the more mothers and fathers, but not other caregivers, engaged in cognitive caregiving.

Parental knowledge is often the result of parents soliciting information from their child and their child's disclosure of that information. Although child disclosure is most closely (and negatively) associated with behavior problems in adolescence, it is not yet known whether this is also the case in childhood. The aim of this study was to examine the longitudinal associations between child disclosure, parental solicitation, and behavior problems in Grades 1 to 4 in a Canadian sample, taking into account intra-individual stability, the child's gender, and socioeconomic status. The mothers and teachers of 911 children (62.7% boys) completed questionnaires in Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4. A Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model (RI-CLPM) showed that behavior problems in Grade 2 predicted an increase in parental solicitation in Grade 3. In contrast, behavior problems in Grade 3 predicted a decrease in parental solicitation in Grade 4. No cross-lagged association with child disclosure was observed. Although these results differ from those reported in adolescence, they suggest that middle childhood is a sensitive period for parent-child communication and behavior problems.

The Lines-of-Defense model postulates that older adults should engage in important health goals and behaviors for as long as possible and adjust them downwardly only when they become impossible to pursue. This process is thought to be supported by goal engagement and self-protective control strategies. We tested this model in a 4-year longitudinal study of 236 older adults by predicting the maintenance of physical activity using accelerometers. We hypothesized that older adults would exert shifts from more strenuous (e.g., vigorous and moderate intensity) to less strenuous (e.g., light intensity) physical activity over time. In addition, we expected that these processes would be supported by the use of health-specific control strategies. Multilevel modeling revealed that older adults experienced declines in moderate and vigorous physical activity but increases in light physical activity. Health engagement predicted an accelerated increase in light physical activity, and exerted substantial, but longitudinally decreasing, benefits for moderate physical activity. Health-related self-protection, by contrast, predicted the maintenance of vigorous physical activity over time. These results support the Lines-of-Defense model by demonstrating that control strategies can predict the maintenance of older adults' physical activity levels.

The aims of the current 30-year prospective study were to determine: 1) whether socially withdrawn kindergarten children are less likely than others to enter serious romantic relationships or become parents by age 34, 2) whether socially withdrawn children parent differently than non-withdrawn individuals when they grow up, and 3) whether subtypes of withdrawal are associated with different adult outcomes. Following Harrist et al. (1997), 558 kindergarten children (81% White, 17% Black) were categorized into one of five groups: four clusters of social withdrawal (n = 95 unsociable, 23 passive-anxious, 18 active-isolate, 25 sad/depressed) or non-withdrawal (n = 397), using directly observed school behavior and teacher ratings. About 30 years later (M _age = 34.45 years, SD = 0.62 years), participants self-reported on their romantic relationship and parent status and parenting warmth and harshness. Overall, the group of socially withdrawn children was no more or less likely than the non-withdrawn group to be in a current relationship or a parent, nor did they report any differences in parenting. However, the active-isolate subtype of social withdrawal, characterized by impulsivity and anger, was less likely than the non-withdrawn group to be in a current relationship (B = -1.24, p < 0.05). This study suggests socially withdrawn children in the U.S. fare similarly to non-withdrawn peers in adulthood in their romantic relationships and parenting, but a subgroup of active-isolate children may be at risk of not entering adult relationships.