Although hopelessness has been linked to depression for centuries, the diagnostic criteria for depression are inconsistent with regard to the status of hopelessness. Most research on hopelessness and depression has focused on adults. The current study examined this relation in children and adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Research suggests that higher childhood self-regulation (CSR) predicts lower adiposity in adolescence. However, it is unclear whether this relationship differs by sex or by baseline weight status. Thus, this study investigated these questions in a longitudinal, community-based cohort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
September 2020
The development of biological markers of aging has primarily focused on adult samples. Epigenetic clocks are a promising tool for measuring biological age that show impressive accuracy across most tissues and age ranges. In adults, deviations from the DNA methylation (DNAm) age prediction are correlated with several age-related phenotypes, such as mortality and frailty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: To examine variation in child DNA methylation to assess its potential as a pathway for effects of childhood social adversity on health across the life course.
Materials & Methods: In a diverse, prospective community sample of 178 kindergarten children, associations between three types of social experience and DNA methylation within buccal epithelial cells later in childhood were examined.
Results: Family income, parental education and family psychosocial adversity each associated with increased or decreased DNA methylation (488, 354 and 102 sites, respectively) within a unique set of genomic CpG sites.
A growing body of research has documented associations between adverse childhood environments and DNA methylation, highlighting epigenetic processes as potential mechanisms through which early external contexts influence health across the life course. The present study tested a complementary hypothesis: indicators of children's early internal, biological, and behavioral responses to stressful challenges may also be linked to stable patterns of DNA methylation later in life. Children's autonomic nervous system reactivity, temperament, and mental health symptoms were prospectively assessed from infancy through early childhood, and principal components analysis (PCA) was applied to derive composites of biological and behavioral reactivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEntry into kindergarten is a developmental milestone that children may differentially experience as stressful, with implications for variability in neurobiological functioning. Guided by the goodness-of-fit framework, this study tested the hypothesis that kindergarten children's (N = 338) daily cortisol would be affected by the "match" or "mismatch" between children's temperament and qualities of the classroom relational context. The robustness of these associations was also explored among a separate sample of children in third grade (N = 165).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
July 2016
Background: Much research has focused on the deleterious neurobiological effects of childhood adversity that may underlie internalizing disorders. While most youth show emotional adaptation following adversity, the corresponding neural mechanisms remain poorly understood.
Methods: In this longitudinal community study, we examined the associations among childhood family adversity, adolescent internalizing symptoms, and their interaction on regional brain activation and amygdala/hippocampus functional connectivity during emotion processing in 132 adolescents.
J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol
February 2018
Rumination, a perseverative cognitive process that involves repetitively and passively focusing on negative emotions, is a transdiagnostic risk factor for the development of psychopathology. Although rumination has been linked to various forms of psychopathology including depression, anxiety, and alcohol misuse, little is known about the conditions that lead to multifinality. Here, we test putative moderators (Nolen-Hoeksema & Watkins, 2011) of the association between rumination and subsequent internalizing symptoms and frequency of alcohol use during adolescence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvolutionary-minded developmentalists studying predictive-adaptive-response processes linking childhood adversity with accelerated female reproductive development and health scientists investigating the developmental origins of health and disease (DOoHaD) may be tapping the same process, whereby longer-term health costs are traded off for increased probability of reproducing before dying via a process of accelerated reproductive maturation. Using data from 73 females, we test the following propositions using path analysis: (a) greater exposure to prenatal stress predicts greater maternal depression and negative parenting in infancy, (b) which predicts elevated basal cortisol at 4.5 years, (c) which predicts accelerated adrenarcheal development, (d) which predicts more physical and mental health problems at age 18.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA large body of research has linked hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function and alcohol consumption, including work suggesting that flatter diurnal cortisol slopes are associated with greater alcohol use. A lack of longitudinal studies and a focus on adult and alcoholic populations leaves unclear whether such associations are also present in younger, non-clinical populations and whether flatter diurnal slopes are a consequence of or preexisting risk factor for alcohol use; however, theory suggests such associations may be mutually reinforcing. In a longitudinal, community sample of 200 (55% female) adolescents, the current study demonstrates that flatter diurnal cortisol slope at age 11 predicts higher levels of alcohol use from ages 15-18, and that heavier alcohol use in turn predicts further flattening of diurnal cortisol rhythm at age 18.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus is believed to underlie the development of much psychopathology. However, to date only limited longitudinal data relate early behavior with neural structure later in life. Our objective was to examine the relationship of early life externalizing behavior with adolescent brain structure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough adolescence is marked by increased negative life events and internalizing problems, few studies investigate this association as an ongoing longitudinal process. Moreover, while there are considerable individual differences in the degree to which these phenomena are linked, little is known about the origins of these differences. The present study examines early life stress (ELS) exposure and early-adolescent longitudinal afternoon cortisol level as predictors of the covariation between internalizing symptoms and negative life events across high school.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior research has linked either basal cortisol levels or stress-induced cortisol responses to adiposity; however, it remains to be determined whether these distinct cortisol measures exert joint or independent effects. Further, it is unclear how they interact with individual and environmental characteristics to predict adiposity. The present study aims to address whether morning cortisol levels and cortisol responses to a psychosocial stressor independently and/or interactively influence body mass index (BMI) in 218 adolescents (117 female) participating in a longitudinal community study, and whether associations are moderated by sex and exposure to early maternal depression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite widespread recognition that the physiological systems underlying stress reactivity are well coordinated at a neurobiological level, surprisingly little empirical attention has been given to delineating precisely how the systems actually interact with one another when confronted with stress. We examined cross-system response proclivities in anticipation of and following standardized laboratory challenges in 664 4- to 14-year-olds from four independent studies. In each study, measures of stress reactivity within both the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objectives: To examine the patterns of insomnia and sleep-related movement from ages 4.5 to 9 years, their concurrent associations with mental health symptoms in childhood, and the longitudinal associations of sleep-problem persistence with mental health symptoms at ages 9 and 18 years.
Design: A 14-year prospective follow-up study.
Substantial research has implicated the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axes independently in adolescent mental health problems, though this literature remains largely inconclusive. Given the cross-talk between the HPA and HPG axes and their increased activation in adolescence, a dual-axis approach that examines both axes simultaneously is proposed to predict the emergence and persistence of adolescent mental health problems. After briefly orienting readers to HPA and HPG axis functioning, we review the literature examining associations between hormone levels and changes with behavior during adolescence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaltreatment during childhood is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression, which are major public health problems. However, the underlying brain mechanism linking maltreatment and internalizing disorders remains poorly understood. Maltreatment may alter the activation of fear circuitry, but little is known about its impact on the connectivity of this circuitry in adolescence and whether such brain changes actually lead to internalizing symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Past research has associated childhood characteristics and experiences with alcohol use at single time points in adolescence. Other work has focused on drinking trajectories across adolescence but with risk factors typically no earlier than middle or high school. Similarly, although the connection between underage drinking and affiliation with deviant friends is well established, early risk factors for their covariation across adolescence are uncertain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrawing on conceptual models illustrating the advantages of a multisystemic, interactive, developmental approach to understanding development, the present study examines the covariation of stress and sex hormones across the adolescent transition and the effect of early life stress (ELS) on neuroendocrine coupling to gain insight into atypical development. Morning levels of cortisol, testosterone, and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) were assessed at ages 11, 13, and 15; ELS was assessed during the infancy and preschool periods. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that cortisol-DHEA coupling patterns progressed to tight, positive coupling across adolescence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Childhood and adolescent obesity have reached epidemic levels; however, little is known about the psychobiological underpinnings of obesity in youth and whether these differ from the mechanisms identified in adults. The current study examines concurrent (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStress and associated alterations in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) function have deleterious influence on the development of multiple mental and physical health problems. Prior research has aimed to identify individuals most at risk for the development of these stress-related maladies by examining factors that may contribute to inter-individual differences in HPA responses to acute stress. The objectives of this study were to investigate, in adolescents, (1) whether differences in neurocognitive abilities influenced cortisol reactivity to an acute stressor, (2) whether internalizing psychiatric disorders influenced this relationship, and (3) whether acute cognitive stress-appraisal mechanisms mediated an association between neurocognitive function and cortisol reactivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHere, we describe a novel method for volumetric segmentation of the amygdala from MRI images collected from 35 human subjects. This approach is adapted from open-source techniques employed previously with the hippocampus (Suh et al., 2011; Wang et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEarly life stress (ELS) and function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis predict later psychopathology. Animal studies and cross-sectional human studies suggest that this process might operate through amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) circuitry implicated in the regulation of emotion. Here we prospectively investigated the roles of ELS and childhood basal cortisol amounts in the development of adolescent resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC), assessed by functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI), in the amygdala-PFC circuit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring childhood and adolescence, physiological, psychological, and behavioral processes strongly promote weight gain and increased appetite while also inhibiting weight loss and decreased appetite. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV (DSM-IV) treats both weight-gain/increased-appetite and weight-loss/decreased-appetite as symptoms of major depression during these developmental periods, despite the fact that one complements typical development and the other opposes it. To disentangle the developmental versus pathological correlates of weight and appetite disturbance in younger age groups, the current study examined symptoms of depression in an aggregated sample of 2307 children and adolescents, 47.
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