Increased freezing and decreased positive affect in postinstitutionalized children.

Background: Early neglect is associated with increased risk of internalizing disorders in humans and with increased fear behavior in animals. When children are adopted out of orphanages in which they experienced institutional neglect, anxiety and depressive disorders often are not seen until adolescence. What has not been examined is whether even young children adopted from institutional care exhibit heightened fear or behavioral inhibition.

Associations between early life adversity and executive function in children adopted internationally from orphanages.

Executive function (EF) abilities are increasingly recognized as an important protective factor for children experiencing adversity, promoting better stress and emotion regulation as well as social and academic adjustment. We provide evidence that early life adversity is associated with significant reductions in EF performance on a developmentally sensitive battery of laboratory EF tasks that measured cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. Animal models also suggest that early adversity has a negative impact on the development of prefrontal cortex-based cognitive functions.

Early attachment organization moderates the parent-child mutually coercive pathway to children's antisocial conduct.

This multimethod study of 101 mothers, fathers, and children elucidates poorly understood role of children's attachment security as moderating a common maladaptive trajectory: from parental power assertion, to child resentful opposition, to child antisocial conduct. Children's security was assessed at 15 months, parents' power assertion observed at 25 and 38 months, children's resentful opposition to parents observed at 52 months, and antisocial conduct rated by parents at 67 months. Moderated mediation analyses indicated that in insecure dyads, parental power assertion predicted children's resentful opposition, which then predicted antisocial conduct.