From Maltreatment to Psychiatric Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence: The Relevance of Emotional Maltreatment.

Different forms of maltreatment are thought to incur a cumulative and non-specific toll on mental health. However, few large-scale studies draw on psychiatric diagnoses manifesting in early childhood and adolescence to identify sequelae of differential maltreatment exposures, and emotional maltreatment, in particular. Fine-grained multi-source dimensional maltreatment assessments and validated age-appropriate clinical interviews were conducted in a sample of = 778 3 to 16-year-olds.

[Assessment of Maltreatment in Childhood and Adolescence].

In view of mounting evidence for substantial prognostic relevance of child maltreatment for the future developmental course, assessment of maltreatment in children and adolescents is increasingly gaining attention. At the same time, maltreatment assessment is replete with difficulties, ranging from the definition of maltreatment and establishment of threshold values determining when events meet prognostically relevant criteria, to poor agreement between sources. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of instruments for assessing maltreatment in children and adolescents.

Conceptual Analysis: A Social Neuroscience Approach to Interpersonal Interaction in the Context of Disruption and Disorganization of Attachment (NAMDA).

Humans are strongly dependent upon social resources for allostasis and emotion regulation. This applies especially to early childhood because humans-as an altricial species-have a prolonged period of dependency on support and input from caregivers who typically act as sources of co-regulation. Accordingly, attachment theory proposes that the history and quality of early interactions with primary caregivers shape children's internal working models of attachment.

[Gender-Specific Differences in the Utilization of Health Care Services in an Urban Population Sample].

Aim: This study explores gender-specific differences in the utilization of health care services in an urban population sample.

Method: As part of the LIFE-ADULT-Study, 2244 individuals (19-79 years) filled out a questionnaire about their use of health care services during the past year. Information regarding the frequency of general and specialized practitioners consultation, medical advice from general practitioners and utilization of preventive and health promoting programs were analyzed.

Getting less than their fair share: Maltreated youth are hyper-cooperative yet vulnerable to exploitation in a public goods game.

Human cooperative behavior has long been thought to decline under adversity. However, studies have primarily examined perceived patterns of cooperation, with little eye to actual cooperative behavior embedded within social interaction. Game-theoretical paradigms can help close this gap by unpacking subtle differences in how cooperation unfolds during initial encounters.

Reduced hair cortisol after maltreatment mediates externalizing symptoms in middle childhood and adolescence.

Background: The enduring impact of childhood maltreatment on biological systems and ensuing psychopathology remains incompletely understood. Long-term effects of stress may be reflected in cumulative cortisol secretion over several months, which is now quantifiable via hair cortisol concentrations (HCC). We conducted a first comprehensive investigation utilizing the potential of hair cortisol analysis in a large sample of maltreated and nonmaltreated children and adolescents.

A Multisource Approach to Assessing Child Maltreatment From Records, Caregivers, and Children.

Practitioners and researchers alike face the challenge that different sources report inconsistent information regarding child maltreatment. The present study capitalizes on concordance and discordance between different sources and probes applicability of a multisource approach to data from three perspectives on maltreatment-Child Protection Services (CPS) records, caregivers, and children. The sample comprised 686 participants in early childhood (3- to 8-year-olds; n = 275) or late childhood/adolescence (9- to 16-year-olds; n = 411), 161 from two CPS sites and 525 from the community oversampled for psychosocial risk.

The Pizzagame: A virtual public goods game to assess cooperative behavior in children and adolescents.

Social dilemmas are characterized by conflicts between immediate self-interest and long-term collective goals. Although such conflicts lie at the heart of various challenging social interactions, we know little about how cooperation in these situations develops. To extend work on social dilemmas to child and adolescent samples, we developed an age-appropriate computer task (the Pizzagame) with the structural features of a public goods game (PGG).

Analyzing pathways from childhood maltreatment to internalizing symptoms and disorders in children and adolescents (AMIS): a study protocol.

Background: Effective interventions for maltreated children are impeded by gaps in our knowledge of the etiopathogenic mechanisms leading from maltreatment to mental disorders. Although some studies have already identified individual risk factors, there is a lack of large-scale multilevel research on how psychosocial, neurobiological, and genetic factors act in concert to modulate risk of internalizing psychopathology in childhood following maltreatment. To help close this gap, we aim to delineate gender-specific pathways from maltreatment to psychological disorder/resilience.