To better understand the role of neuroendocrinological regulation in adolescent mental health, stress reactivity needs to be analyzed through both the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Accordingly, this study examined how adolescents' internalizing and externalizing mental health symptoms are…

Media use and screen time show both positive and negative effects on child development. Parents' behaviors, perceptions, and regulation of parent and child screen-based device (SBD) use may be critical understudied factors in explaining these mixed effects. We developed the Parent Screen-Based Device Use Survey (PSUS) to assess parental use of…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted opportunities for adolescents to progress through a typical developmental trajectory of adjustment and self-regulation. Adolescents across many contexts have shown an increase in adjustment difficulties during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. Utilizing data collected from 830 Italian adolescents from…

Parental incarceration (PI) is negatively associated with emotional, educational, and psychological child outcomes. However, few studies explore potential mechanisms through which these outcomes are transmitted or the means by which prosocial outcomes might develop. This study used data from two waves of a population cohort study of children aged…

Early adversity is associated with both internalizing and externalizing problems among children, and effects of adversity on dimensions of child temperament may underlie these links. However, very little is known about the role of child sex in these processes. The current study examined whether there are indirect effects of early adversity on…

Mothers of adolescents and adults with fragile X syndrome (FXS) are faced with high levels of parenting stress. The extent to which mothers are negatively impacted by this stress, however, may be influenced by their own genetic status. The present study uses a diathesis-stress model to examine the ways in which a genetic vulnerability in mothers…

Much research on the quality of child care reveals it--in the case of low-quality child care--to be related to poorer child functioning, net of confounding factors, perhaps especially in the case of cognitive-linguistic performance. Recent work using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early…

Behavioral problems are frequent among post-institutionalized Eastern European adoptees. However, risk factors related to outcomes have not been fully delineated. We evaluated 50 Eastern European adoptees, age 8-10 years, with their adoptive families for more than five years. Cognitive and behavioral outcomes and parenting stress were evaluated in…

There has been recent emphasis on the importance of investigating prosocial and antisocial behavior simultaneously owing to doubts about whether examining one automatically gives information about the other. However, there has been little empirical research into this question. The present study (based on a large population sample of…

This study examined associations between infant-mother attachment, assessed using Ainsworth's Strange Situation at 12-months, and mother-child narrative co-construction in 110 Israeli mothers and their 71/2 year-old children to examine aspects of Bowlby's (1973) notion of "Goal-Corrected Partnerships". Narrative co-constructions were…

Behavioral responses to stress and challenge are based in emotional and physiological arousal reactions. Adolescents with maladaptive or problematic behavior patterns, such as internalizing or externalizing problems, are likely to show atypical emotional and physiological reactions to stress. Relations between problems and reactions to stress were…

The objective of this study is to examine preschool-age correlates of the maternal version of the Attachment Q-Set (AQS) (Waters & Deane, 1985) in order to provide validity data. Concurrent associations between the Attachment Q-Set and measures of separation-reunion attachment classifications (Cassidy & Marvin, 1992), quality of mother-child…