This study describes the rationale, design, development, and technical properties of SELweb MS, a direct assessment of social and emotional competencies in middle school students. Assessment and item design were iteratively developed with input from youth and experts to measure five domains: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness,…

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with children's internalizing and externalizing problems. IPV is thought to impair mothers' ability to scaffold young children's emotion regulation through coregulated interactions. Mother-child language style matching (LSM) is an index of coregulation that has yet to be examined in…

Students with disabilities (SWDs) are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their general education peers and more likely to be chronically absent. This study uses 5 years of student-level data for all Michigan special education students to examine the relationship between educational setting, absenteeism, and disciplinary outcomes. Using…

Parent depressive symptomatology is robust risk factor for externalizing behavior in childhood (Goodman et al., 2011). Although the precise mechanisms underlying this association have yet to be fully illuminated, there is some evidence that parent depression can impact externalizing behavior via both genetic and environmental pathways. In the…

Experiencing an early pubertal transition has been shown to increase the risk for internalizing and externalizing outcomes among girls. It is less clear how the expectations of other individuals can be critical determinants of vulnerability for early developers. This study used an experimental design to examine whether the expectations of teachers…

Prior work has suggested that inter-parental conflict likely plays an etiological role in child behavior problems. However, family-level measurement of inter-parental conflict in most traditional child twin studies has made it difficult to tease apart the specific causal mechanisms underlying this association. The Children's Perception of…

This study focuses on the sexual phenomenon of "hooking up." A hook-up is defined as a single sexual encounter that may or may not include sexual intercourse with someone who is a stranger, brief acquaintance, or friend. The aim of this study was to document the prevalence of hook-ups in a sample of 1,011 urban middle and high school…

The present study examined the psychometric properties of scores from a direct measure of behavioral regulation, the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS) with 3- to 6-year-old children in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Specifically, we investigated (a) the nature and variability of HTKS scores, including relations to…

Background: Prenatal problems are among theorized etiologies for child disruptive behavior problems. A key question concerns whether etiological contributors are shared across the broad range of disruptive psychopathology or are partially or largely distinct. Method: We examined prenatal smoking exposure and low birth weight as risk factors for…